Title: ‘Outing’ the Hidden Other: Stranger-Women in the Work of Toni Morrison
Abstract: With the award to her of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Toni Morrison, long a superb writer of fiction, became recognized internationally in the literary field. In the above quotation from her Nobel lecture, 'When Language Dies', she challenged us with the radical and even dangerous transformative power of narrative. In 1995, with her address to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, a wider audience began not only to appreciate, but to deliberately reflect upon Morrison's insight as a theologian, through both her critical works and her fiction. This chapter1 will examine the writings of Toni Morrison as excursion in ethics, taking place on three levels: that of the lives of characters in her novels, that of Morrison's act of creation of these texts, and that of her critical reflection on literature and literary study in her non-fiction writings. Beginning with the last of these, I shall discuss the content and implications of Morrison's 1992 book playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination, as a descendant of Edward Said's Orientalism, but with a new field and focus. Morrison's description therein of American Africanism, the hidden Black presence in white American literature that is exotic, feared, never fully delineated but always necessarily there, can be seen to provide the fuel for her own literary texts, in which not only are the Black characters fully developed, but the 'ultimate other', the Black female, is brought 'out' of the shadows and becomes central. The communities she depicts in these novels, however, are far from idealized, and thus must be taken seriously as 'real'.2 I shall reflect on two of Morrison's early novels, Song of Solomon (especially the character Pilate Dead) and Sula, suggesting finally that Morrison's writing process takes up — and issues — the challenge of literary scholarship as a self-conscious, necessary ethical enterprise, a call to responsibility in writing and reading community.KeywordsLiterary TextAmerican LiteratureLiterary ImaginationNobel LectureSubsequent ReferenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 1997
Publication Date: 1997-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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