Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels Jean Wyatt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wyatt, Jean, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Narration (Rhetoric).

Love in literature.

Morrison, Toni--Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (233 pages)

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2017

Place of Publication:

Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Summary:

In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison's seven later novels. Love comes in a new and surprising shape in each of the later novels; for example, Love presents it as the deep friendship between little girls; in Home it acts as a disruptive force producing deep changes in subjectivity; and in Jazz it becomes something one innovates and recreates each moment-like jazz itself. Each novel's unconventional idea of love requires a new experimental narrative form. Wyatt analyzes the stylistic and structural innovations of each novel, showing how disturbances in narrative chronology, surprise endings, and gaps mirror the dislocated temporality and distorted emotional responses of the novels' troubled characters and demand that the reader situate the present-day problems of the characters in relation to a traumatic African American past. The narrative surprises and gaps require the reader to become an active participant in making meaning. And the texts' complex narrative strategies draw out the reader's convictions about love, about gender, about race-and then prompt the reader to reexamine them, so that reading becomes an active ethical dialogue between text and reader. Wyatt uses psychoanalytic concepts to analyze Morrison's narrative structures and how they work on readers. Love and Narrative Form devotes a chapter to each of Morrison's later novels: Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child.

Contents:

Introduction: Love and narrative form

Maternal language and maternal history in Beloved

Riffing on love and playing with narration in Jazz

Displacement

political, psychic, and textual

in Paradise

Love's time and the reader: ethical effects of nachträglichkeit (belatedness) in Love

Failed messages, maternal loss, and narrative form in A mercy

Severed limbs, the uncanny, and the return of the repressed in Home

Love, trauma, and the body in God help the child

Conclusion: Revisioning love and slavery.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780820350592

0820350591

OCLC:

982012397