Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination

Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination
Title Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination PDF eBook
Author Kathleen Marks
Publisher University of Missouri Press
Total Pages 174
Release 2002
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 0826262783

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"Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination investigates Toni Morrison's Beloved in light of ancient Greek influences, arguing that the African American experience depicted in the novel can be set in a broader context than is usually allowed. Kathleen Marks gives a history of the apotropaic from ancient to modern times, and shows the ways that Beloved'sprotagonist, Sethe, and her community engage the apotropaic as a mode of dealing with their communal suffering. Apotropaic, from the Greek, meaning "to turn away from," refers to rituals that were performed in ancient times to ward off evil deities. Modern scholars use the term to denote an action that, in attempting to prevent an evil, causes that very evil. Freud employed the apotropaic to explain his thought concerning Medusa and the castration complex, and Derrida found the apotropaic's logic of self-sabotage consonant with his own thought. Marks draws on this critical history and argues that Morrison's heroine's effort to keep the past at bay is apotropaic: a series of gestures aimed at resisting a danger, a threat, an imperative. These gestures anticipate, mirror, and put into effect that which they seek to avoid--one does what one finds horrible so as to mitigate its horror. In Beloved, Sethe's killing of her baby reveals this dynamic: she kills the baby in order to save it. As do all great heroes, Sethe transgresses boundaries, and such transgressions bring with them terrific dangers: for example, the figure Beloved. Yet Sethe's action has ritualistic undertones that link it to the type of primal crimes that can bring relief to a petrified community. It is through these apotropaic gestures that the heroine and the community resist what Morrison calls "cultural amnesia" and engage in a shared past, finally inaugurating a new order of love. Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination is eclectic in its approach--calling upon Greek religion, Greek mythology and underworld images, and psychology. Marks looks at the losses and benefits of the kind of self-damage/self-agency the apotropaic affords. Such an approach helps to frame the questions of the role of suffering in human life, the relation between humans and the underworld, and the uses of memory and history."--Publishers website

Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'

Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'
Title Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' PDF eBook
Author Justine Tally
Publisher Routledge
Total Pages 334
Release 2008-11-18
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1134361300

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This work expands the scope of Morrison’s project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the author’s specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilization’s primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, springing from the very Heart of Africa. Despite the weight of "white" authority and the disparaging of "blackness," Beloved’s multiple "ghosts" conjure up a legacy so potent that no authoritarian discourse has been able to entirely erase it, a legacy that still speaks to us from a heritage we no longer acknowledge yet that nevertheless remains, and sustains us.

Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s "Beloved"

Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s
Title Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s "Beloved" PDF eBook
Author Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem
Publisher Routledge
Total Pages 253
Release 2020-11-17
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1000213773

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Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: The Case for Reparations is an inspired contribution to the scholarship on one of the most influential American novels and novelists. The author positions this contemporary classic as a meditation on historical justice and re-comprehends it as both a formal tragedy— a generic translation of fiction and tragedy or a “novel-tragedy” (Kliger)—and a novel of objects. Its many things—literary, conceptual, linguistic— are viewed as vessels carrying the (hi)story and the political concerns. From this, a third conclusion is drawn: Fadem argues for a view of Beloved as a case for reparations. That status is founded on two outstanding object lessons: the character of Beloved as embodiment of the subject-object relations defining the slave state and the grammatical object “weather” in the sentence “The rest is...” on the novel’s final page. This intertextual reference places Beloved in a comparative link with Hamlet and Oresteia. Fadem’s research is meticulous in engaging the full spectrum of tragedy theory, much critical theory, and a full swathe of scholarship on the novel. Few critics take up the matter of reparations, still fewer the politics of genre, craft, and form. This scholar posits Morrison’s tragedy as constituting a searing critique of modernity, as composed through meaningful intertextualities and as crafted by profound “thingly” objects (Brown). Altogether, Fadem has divined a fascinating singular treatment of Beloved exploring the connections between form and craft together with critical historical and political implications. The book argues, finally, that this novel’s first concern is justice, and its chief aim to serve as a clarion call for material— and not merely symbolic—reparations. This book is freely available to read at https://taylorandfrancis.com/socialjustice/?c=language-literature-arts#

Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison's Beloved
Title Toni Morrison's Beloved PDF eBook
Author Harold Bloom
Publisher Infobase Publishing
Total Pages 231
Release 2009
Genre African American women in literature
ISBN 1604131845

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A collection of critical essays that examine Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved," with a chronology of the author's life, an overview of the novel, its plot, themes, characters, and literary impact, and an introduction by Harold Bloom.

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison
Title Toni Morrison PDF eBook
Author Pelagia Goulimari
Publisher Routledge
Total Pages 239
Release 2012-03-29
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1136698671

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Toni Morrison's visionary explorations of freedom and identity, self and community, against the backdrop of African American history have established her as one of the foremost novelists of her time; an artist whose seriousness of purpose and imaginative power have earned her both widespread critical acclaim and great popular success. This guide to Morrison’s work offers: an accessible introduction to Morrison’s life and historical contexts a guide to her key works and the themes and concerns that run through them an overview of critical texts and perspectives on each of Morrison’s works cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism a chronology of Morrison’s life and works. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Toni Morrison and seeking a guide to her work and a way into the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds it.

James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays

James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays
Title James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays PDF eBook
Author Lovalerie King
Publisher Springer
Total Pages 305
Release 2006-10-16
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 0230601383

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This collection of comparative critical and theoretical essays examines James Baldwin and Toni Morrison's reciprocal literary relationship. By reading these authors side-by-side, this collection forges new avenues of discovery and interpretation related to their representations of African American and American literature and cultural experience.

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison
Title Toni Morrison PDF eBook
Author L. Wagner-Martin
Publisher Springer
Total Pages 229
Release 2015-04-22
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1137446706

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A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.