While The Bluest Eye centers on the rape of a young black girl by her father, the novel is layered with the many hierarchical layers of domination and submission, and greater and smaller rapes that occur throughout its pages.
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 9781438130439
Category: African Americans in literature
Page: 131
View: 797
Discusses the writing of The bluest eye by Toni Morrison. Includes critical essays on the work and a brief biography of the author.A powerful interrogation of what it means to conform to an idea of beauty, The Bluest Eye asks vital questions about race, class and gender and remains one of Toni Morrison’s most unforgettable works.
Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9781448104741
Category: Fiction
Page: 199
View: 134
Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison’s best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, AUTHOR OF QUEENIE Pecola Breedlove longs for blond hair and blue eyes, so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the marigolds in her garden will not bloom, and her wish will not come true. Pecola's life is about to change in other painful and devastating ways. A powerful interrogation of what it means to conform to an idea of beauty, The Bluest Eye asks vital questions about race, class and gender and remains one of Toni Morrison’s most unforgettable works.BLUEST. EYE. Beauty is said to be in the eyes of the beholder, but what if the image of beauty is forced into the minds of ... in many different ways, as far as looks and personality goes, but the novel The Bluest Eye begs to differ.
Author: Sumedha Bhandari
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9783960676188
Category: Literary Collections
Page: 95
View: 957
Toni Morrison, the eighth American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, is perhaps the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature. Astutely, she describes aspects of human lives and, unlike many other writers, reveals the hope and beauty that underlines the worlds ugliness. Her artistic excellence lies in achieving a perfect balance between black literature and writing abouth the universally truth. Although firmly grounded in the cultural heritage and social concerns of black Americans, her work transcends narrowly prescribed conceptions of ethnic literature, exhibiting universal mythical patterns and overtones. Her novels, thus, mourn on universal concerns. The endeavor in this study is to scrutinize the unspoken lexis of Toni Morrison’s works and to unveil the layers of humanistic concerns that provide denotations to her words. Earlier studies on this writer have concentrated on adjudging her as a writer addressing problems of black people. However, this book tries to extend this notion to encompass the problems of whole human community by assimilating blacks in the general drama of life. Before dyeing the strings of Morrison’s novels with the colour of humanist concerns, this book delineates the term ‘Humanism’ from which these humanistic concerns arise.From her first published novel, The Bluest Eye,7 Morrison challenges and deconstructs the double plight of black women in the U.S. by exposing, first, the processes involved in racial and gendered “othering” and, second, the consequent ...
Author: Mohamed Sghir Syad
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783668217867
Category: Literary Collections
Page: 16
View: 399
Essay from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Literature, University of Nottingham (School of Canadian and American Studies), course: American studies, language: English, abstract: Racism and sexism are endemic to the stereotypical “othering” enterprise that brackets black female subjectivity in a forced homogeneity. Doubly stereotyped as the racial and sexual “other”, black women risk being forced to signify the negative counterpart in a binary system of cultural and political representation. Usually white and male, the defining subject associates negatively inflected traits with the defined “other” — in this context a black female — while reserving positive attributes for its own definition and identification. In recasting black women’s subjectivity in fiction, Morrison admits the existence of racial and sexual stereotypes. From her first published novel, "The Bluest Eye", Morrison challenges and deconstructs the double plight of black women in the U.S. by exposing, first, the processes involved in racial and gendered “othering” and, second, the consequent internalised effects that transmute into “self-othering.”She uses innovative narrative techniques , such as incorporating frames , like the Dick and Jane primer sections of The Bluest Eye ' . Morrison sometimes uses chapters as parentheses , as in Jazz , and at other times to signal a change ...
Author: Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu
Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group
ISBN: 0313316996
Category: African Americans in literature
Page: 444
View: 679
The first book of its kind, this reference offers hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on Morrison's works, major characters, themes, and other topics. Lengthier essays cover each of her novels, along with various approaches to her writings. Each of the entries was written by an expert contributor, and many close with suggestions for further reading.2 Shame and anger in The Bluest Eye The trauma of racism is , for the racist and the victim , the severe fragmentation of the self.1 MORRISON has said that what prompted her to begin writing her first novel was a sense of loss , a void ...
Author: Jill L. Matus
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 0719044480
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 226
View: 335
This is an illuminating and original introduction to Toni Morrison's fiction, focusing on its engagement with African-American history and the way the traumas of the collective past shape Morrison's work. Jill Matus approaches Morrison's fiction as a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history. She argues that Morrison sees African-American history--from the times of slavery to the continued racial oppressions of the twentieth century--as a history of traumatic experience, and explores how this powerful storyteller bears witness to a painful yet richly enlivening past. Morrison's novels are known for their great lyric power, but they often dwell on scenes of horror, and Matus emphasizes the uneasy relations of memory, pain and pleasure in literature. In doing so, she sheds new light on Morrison as a contemporary writer working at a time when literature is being urgently explored for its capacity to memorialize and testify. Direct and accessible, this critical study highlights the political and historical contexts of Morrison's work, offers close readings of each of the novels, and concludes with a critical overview of the field of Morrison studies.At the end of The Bluest Eye, Pecola is in that messy, uncomfortable, disordered space Morrison claims as paradise, the only possible honest and lived paradise, a space in which the rubble and collapse of oppressive categories dismantle ...
Author: Carmen Gillespie
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 9781438108575
Category: African Americans
Page: 497
View: 347
Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, is perhaps the most important living American author. This work examines Morrison's life and writing, featuring critical analyses of her work and themes, as well as entries on related topics and relevant people, places, and influences.For example , see Marco Portales , " Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye : Shirley Temple and Cholly , " The Centennial Review 30 ( 1986 ) : 500 . 17. Keith Byerman , " Intense Behaviors : The Use of the Grotesque in The Bluest Eye and Eva's ...
Author: Madhu Dubey
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253318416
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 218
View: 697
""A clear and uncluttered writer, Dubey helps us understand these ideological and literary complexities."" -- Virginia Quarterly Review .."". an important contribution to the study of African-American women's fiction. Not only does it provide a compelling introductory account of the nationalist aesthetic, but it provides a detailed documentation of the way in which each of these novels was received in the critical climate of the seventies."" -- College Literature .."". essential reading for anyone intrigued by the narrative craft and social impact of the novels of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones."" -- Claudia Tate ""Dubey forcefully articulates the connection between political and personal mediation in these novels with subtlety, depth, and complexity and without obscuring their textuality."" -- Signs Drawing upon Black feminist theory, Madhu Dubey shows how writers such as Morrison, Walker, and Jones challenged traditional models of Black female identity and generated their own visions of identity, community, and historical change.through African - American community.21 I propose that Morrison's first novel , The Bluest Eye ( 1970 ) , constitutes an authorizing preface for that voice by acknowledging the necessity , for a readership that has suffered from ...
Author: Susan Sniader Lanser
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801480205
Category: American fiction
Page: 304
View: 281
Annotation Writing from positions of cultural exclusion, women have faced constraints not only upon the "content" of fiction but upon the act of narration itself. Narrative voice thus becomes a matter not simply of technique but of social authority: how to speak publicly, to whom, and in whose name. Susan Sniader Lanser here explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. Drawing upon narratological and feminist theory, Lanser sheds new light on the history of "voice" as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining social power.Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty.
Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher:
ISBN: 1442081791
Category: African American girls
Page: 0
View: 822
Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity.--From publisher's description.