|
Craig White's authors |
  |
Toni Morrison (1931- ) |
 |
Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the late 20th-early 21st centuries.
Morrison has written distinguished literary and cultural criticism as well as children's literature, drama, and libretti for for an opera.
Her international reputation rests primarily on several of her ten full-length novels including
The Bluest Eye (1970)—selected for Oprah's Book Club, 2000
Sula (1974)
Song of Solomon (1977)—National Book Critics Circle Award
Tar Baby (1981)
Beloved (1987)—Pulitzer Prize; American Book Award
Jazz (1992)
Paradise (1997)
Love (2003)
A Mercy (2008)
Home (2012)
Life & Career
1931 born Chloe Amelia Wofford in the industrial city of Lorain in Northern Ohio to George and Ramah Willis Wofford.
1949-53 Howard University, B.A. English (Howard U. = leading historically black university in Washington DC)
1955 Cornell University (New York State), M.A. English,
1955-57 Texas Southern University, Houston TX: instructor of English
1957-64 Howard University: instructor of English
1958-64 married to Harold Morrison, Jamaican architect & professor of Architecture, Howard; two sons: Harold & Slade (d. 2010)
later 1960s: editor for Random House, instructor at Yale University & Bard College.
Since her career as an author took off in the 1970s, Morrison has had appointments at several leading American universities.
1993 Nobel Prize in Literature
Literary Style:
As with other great authors (e.g., Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Faulkner), Morrison's fiction is distinguished by great characterization. Her characters seem highly individualized yet immediately recognizable; they seem self-motivated, as if they move and breathe with minds of their own. (This quality of great writers to create the written representation of human souls contributes to readers calling such writers "god-like.")
Morrison's prose, like Faulkner's, isn't always easy to read, but a reader always senses that something's happening and it matters.
Like the great Russian novelists Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Morrison creates action and characters with passion and intellect.
Readers may find Morrison's earlier novels more accessible than her later works. Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize and propelled Morrison to recognition for the Nobel Prize, may represent the midpoint of this evolution, as its narrative remains readable and the characters identifiable as it experiments with more experimental storytelling.
Great writers can move your mind, open new space, make you see and feel anew, make new realities possible
You don't finish reading great literature the way you finish pop lit like vampire novels.
Classic = book that stays open; standard popular text as consumed and then trashed.
challenge: difficult, not reading for escape but for intellectual pleasure, learning
improves with repeated readings; more you know, the more you like (as with friends)
pleasure of company of someone who’s smarter than you are but will accept your company
fearlessness / shock but cool or deadpan
menstruation, naked man, rape, childbirth
surprising 67
love of language 81
Gretchen: physicality 166
Soaphead x-physicality
humanizes Charley--a bum but good-looking
But then, his second assault on the couch, so no sentimentality
man dangerously free
humor p. 54 humor humanizes
question how much white purity and property are built on discrimination and labor of colored people
