Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined as sagas illuminating history, race, culture, and gender politics. This gathering of eight essays by top scholars probes Morrison's novels and her growing body of nonfiction and critical work for the complex and potent aesthetic elements that have made her a major American novelist of the twentieth century. Through traditional aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the grotesque, through issues of form, narrative, and language, and through questions of affect and reader response, the nine essays in this volume bring into relief the dynamic and often overlooked range within Morrison's writing. Employing aesthetic ideas that range from the ancient Greeks to contemporary research in the black English oral tradition, The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison shows the potency of these ideas for interpreting Morrison's writing. This is a force Morrison herself has often suggested in her claims that Greek tragedy bears a striking similarity to "Afro-American communal structures." At the same time each essay attends to the ways in which Morrison also challenges traditional aesthetic concepts, establishing the African American and female voices that are essential to her sensibility. The result is a series of readings that simultaneously expands our understanding of Morrison's work and also provokes new thinking about an aesthetic tradition that is nearly 2,500 years old. These essays offer a rich complement to the dominant approaches in Morrison scholarship by revealing aspects of her work that purely ideological approaches have obscured or about which they have remained oddly silent. Each essay focuses particularly on the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical in Morrison's writing and between the artistic production and its role in the world at large. These relations show the rich political implications that aesthetic analysis engenders. By treating both Morrison's fiction and her nonfiction, the essays reveal a mind and imagination that have long been intimately engaged with the questions and traditions of the aesthetic domain. The result is a provocative and original contribution to Morrison scholarship, and to scholarship in American letters generally.

What should literature with political aims look like? This book traces two rival responses to this question, one prizing clarity and the other confusion, which have dominated political aesthetics since the late nineteenth century. Revisiting recurrences of the avant-garde experimentalism versus critical realism debates from the twentieth century, Geoffrey A. Baker highlights the often violent reductions at work in earlier debates. Instead of prizing one approach over the other, as many participants in those debates have done, Baker focuses on the manner in which the debate itself between these approaches continues to prove productive and enabling for politically engaged writers. This book thus offers a way beyond the simplistic polarity of realism vs. anti-realism in a study that is focused on influential strands of thought in England, France, and Germany and that covers well-known authors such as Zola, Nietzsche, Arnold, Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Adorno, Lukács, Beauvoir, Morrison, and Coetzee.

Focusing on the lineage of pivotal African American and Irish women writers, the author argues that these authors often employ strategies of indirection, via folkloric expression, when exploring unpopular topics. This strategy holds the attention of readers who would otherwise reject the subject matter. The author traces the line of descent from Mary Lavin to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and from Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, showing how obstacles to free expression, though varying from those Lavin and Hurston faced, are still encountered by Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne. The basis for comparing these authors lies in the strategies of indirection they use, as influenced by folklore. The folkloric characters these authors depict-wild denizens of the Otherworld and wise women of various traditions-help their creators insert controversy into fiction in ways that charm rather than alienate readers. Forms of rhetorical indirection that appear in the context of folklore, such as signifying practices, masking, sly civility, and the grotesque or bizarre, come out of the mouths and actions of these writers' magical and magisterial characters. Old traditions can offer new ways of discussing issues such as sexual expression, religious beliefs, or issues of reproduction. As differences between times and cultures affect what "can" and "cannot" be said, folkloric indirection may open up a vista to discourses of which we as readers may not even be aware. Finally, the folk women of Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin open up new points of entry to the discussion of fiction, rhetoric, censorship, and folklore.

This is a study of modernism, sexuality, and subjectivity in the work of two leading women modernists. Each confronted the aspects of her culture and personal history that resulted in a degraded sense of female sexuality and explored how traumatic childhood sexual experiences informed their relationship to female corporeality and fiction-writing.

The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies—termed the post-soul era—created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of "Black aesthetic time"—a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time collide in the process of cultural production—she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders—or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time. Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves.

This work offers a connection between the concrete utopian theory of hope by the Gennan Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch and the literary productions of contemporary African American women writers. The study argues that these literary texts should be read as concrete utopias outlined in Bloch's major work The Principle ofHope. Bloch argues that when people become consciously aware of the dialectical tendencies in concrete utopias will they recognize the possibilities first for their own personal empowerment and then for their communities. As a result of their conscious awareness, readers will be able to perceive the visions of the texts and will begin to actively dream of becoming agents for change themselves. The study claims that most texts by contemporary African American women writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Sherley Anne Williams, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Terry McMillan provide concrete utopian visions. An application of Bloch's theory to these writers enriches a reading of their texts and demonstrates that art is the medium that will remind people of their constant, never-ending responsibility for personal agency.

Examines the individual author's entire body of work and on his/her single works of literature.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Siegen, course: Noble Prize Winners. Instantly canonized?, language: English, abstract: In his book about “Tradition” Edward Shils claims, “there are two pasts.” One is the phenomenal past; the past of realism, the past of occurred incidents which builds a sequence of human action until the present is reached. The other past is the perceived past. As “a much more plastic thing” this form of past is recorded in myths, memory and in literature, which are built up on the encounters and experiences with the occurred incidents. Sethe, the fictional figure and protagonist in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, offers a view towards the timelessness and power of memory: “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.” Does that mean that memories live amongst us? Of course many things we remember today have been there long before our generation was born – for example experiences of our ancestors during World War II, or even myth, traditional orals. Nevertheless, its appearances before do change in the mind of the living generation which is referring to it. Concerning a pedagogical purpose, in his book, Shils claims for a need of tradition as T.S Eliot does in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. With a sensitive regard to the past as function and feeder for a modern artist, it becomes obvious that even novelty presupposes what T.S. Eliot calls “historical sense”. In his essay from 1919 Eliot debates about the problem of time and its relation towards the past. In Eliot’s understanding “[...] the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; [...] This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.”

Includes "List of books indexed" (published also separately).