Toni Morrison : An Ethical Poetics / Yvette Christiansë.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Christiansë, Yvette, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (320 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics 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 labor at the nexus of language and politics, where her fiction interrogates representation itself. Moving between close reading and critical theory, Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics 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. At a time when sustained study devoted to single authors has become rare, this book will be an invaluable resource for readers, scholars, and teachers of Morrison’s work.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Figures

Notes on the Contributors

1 Introduction

2 The Making of an Auteur: The Early Films (1958–1959)

PART I KILLERS

3 Confronting America: Pigs and Battleships and the Politics of US Bases in Postwar Japan

4 Insect Men and Women: Gender, Conflict and Problematic Modernity in Intentions of Murder

5 Hidden in Plain Sight: The False Leads and True Mysteries of Vengeance Is Mine

6 The Eel: Trauma Cinema

PART II CLIENTS

7 The Insect Woman, or: The Female Art of Failure

8 The Obscene in the Everyday: The Pornographers

9 Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desire for Japan’s Cultural Roots: Critical Approaches to Profound Desires of the Gods

10 “Products of Japan”: Karayuki-san, The Making of a Prostitute

11 The Female Body as Transgressor of National Boundaries: The History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess

PART III KINDRED SPIRITS

12 Better Off Being Bacteria: Adaptation and Allegory Frontmatter

Abbreviations for Works by Toni Morrison

Introduction

1. From Witnessing to Death Dealing: On Speaking of and for the Dead

2. Burnt Offerings: Law and Sacrifice

3. Time Out of Joint: The Temporal Logic of Morrison’s Modernist Apocalyptics

4. Beginnings and Endings, Part One: Old Languages / New Bodies

5. Beginnings and Endings, Part Two: The Poetics of Similitude and Disavowal at Utopia’s Gates

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mrz 2022)

ISBN:

9780823293421

0823293424

OCLC:

1369653352