Morrison opens Paradise by constructing a black community based on a traditional, unrelenting patriarchal discourse which seems to be subverted by a rather trivial, private or ¡§feminine¡¨ talk represented by a party of outcast women. Such binary oppositions are thus surfaced continually in the novel and are further intertwined with various genres Morrison draws from myth, fairy tale, romance, biblical story, folklore, vernacular (hi)story, etc. Nevertheless, while elaborating those literary genres and antagonizing sexes, races and classes, she parodies/caricatures and ¡§molests¡¨ them with stereotyped but paradoxical, or contradictory narrative. In so doing, she complicates and revitalizes the seemingly organized but actually paralyzed, unproductive world of language. By fusing and infusing opposite elements into concepts such as stern religious beliefs and one-sided, self-righteous morality, Morrison liberates literature, or language, in a way that it ¡§is both the law and its transgression.¡¨
I quote a phrase from Morrison¡¦s Nobel lecture¡XLanguage¡¦s ¡§force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable¡¨¡Xas part of my title to suggest that her narrative politics¡X¡§stepping in¡¨¡Xis grounded on a sense of human interrelatedness. Demanding as it is, the compassion for distinct individuals, especially for those who are muffled by ¡§representational¡¨ or ¡§monumental¡¨ discourse, is what Morrison tries to gesture toward in her writing. With acute imagination and insightful compassion, she not only voices and makes the ¡§trivial,¡¨ ¡§insignificant¡¨ or ¡§negligible¡¨ things remarkable enough to be juxtaposed with ¡§the grand,¡¨ but also employs them to ¡§step in¡¨ and transform the rather rigid, unreceptive idea of conventional literary canon. Rather than founding a particular ethnic or gendered canon (or hierarchy) to counteract the already dominant, it seems that Morrison appeals to transcend those barriers by releasing the ambiguous, paradoxical and inspiring properties of language, and at the same time, paying deference to diverse, ineffable human differences and experiences.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0729103-024111 |
| Date | 29 July 2003 |
| Creators | Chan, Yan-Ru |
| Contributors | Fu-Ren Chen, Yu-Chen Lin, Ya-Hui Lin |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0729103-024111 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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