Mouth full of blood : essays, speeches and meditations / Toni Morrison.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019, author.

Standardized Title:

Works. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019.

Morrison, Toni.

African American women in literature.

Essays.

Literature.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

ix, 354 pages ; 24 cm

Other Title:

Source of self-regard.

Place of Publication:

London : Chatto & Windus, 2019.

Summary:

A vital new non-fiction collection from one of the most celebrated and revered writers of our time 'Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.' The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993 Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout A Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence. The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. Morrison's Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America. She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America's Black Holocaust Museum. She revisits The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers. A Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all. 'To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And, if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?' The Alexander Lecture series, 2002.

Contents:

Peril

Part I: The foreigner's home. The dead of September 11 ; The foreigner's home ; Racism and fascism ; Home ; Wartalk ; The war on error ; A race in mind: the press in deed ; Moral inhabitants ; The price of wealth, the cost of care ; The habit of art ; The individual artist ; Arts advocacy ; Sarah Lawrence commencement address ; The slavebody and the blackbody ; Harlem on my mind: contesting memory

meditation on museums, culture, and integration ; Women, race, and memory ; Literature and public life ; The Nobel lecture in literature ; Cinderella's stepsisters ; The future of time: literature and diminished expectations

Interlude: Black matter(s). Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. ; Race matters ; Black matter(s) ; Unspeakable things unspoken: the Afro-American presence in American literature ; Academic whispers ; Gertrude Stein and the difference she makes ; Hard, true, and lasting

Part II: God's language. James Baldwin eulogy ; The site of memory ; God's language ; Grendel and his mother ; The writer before the page ; The trouble with paradise ; On "Beloved" ; Chinua Achebe ; Introduction of Peter Sellars ; Tribute to Romare Bearden ; Faulkner and women ; The source of self-regard ; Rememory ; Memory, creation, and fiction ; Goodbye to all that: race, surrogacy, and farewell ; Invisible ink: reading the writing and writing the reading.

Notes:

"First published in the US as "The source of self-regard" by Alfred A. Knopf in 2019."--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9781784742850

1784742856

9781784742867

1784742864

OCLC:

1086578194

Publisher Number:

99983105094