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Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics

Online ISBN:
9780823239191
Print ISBN:
9780823239153
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics

Yvette Christiansë
Yvette Christiansë

Associate Professor

English Department, Fordham University
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Published:
11 February 2013
Online ISBN:
9780823239191
Print ISBN:
9780823239153
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

This book situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered, and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience. In foregrounding the ethics of fiction writing, the book resists any triumphalist reading of Morrison's achievement in order to allow the meditative, unsettled, and unsettling questions that arise throughout her long labour at the nexus of language and politics, where her fiction interrogates representation itself. Moving between close reading and critical theory, the book reveals the ways in which Morrison's primary engagement with language has been a search for how and what language is made to communicate, and for how and what speaks in and from generation to generation. There is no easy escape from such legacy, no escape into a pure language free of the burdens of racialized agendas. Rather, there is the example of Morrison's commitment to writerly, which is to say readerly, wakefulness.

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