African Spiritual Traditions In The Novels Of Toni Morrison

Author : K. Zauditu-Selassie
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : STANFORD:36105131678455

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African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison by K. Zauditu-Selassie Pdf

"Addresses a real need: a scholarly and ritually informed reading of spirituality in the work of a major African American author. No other work catalogues so thoroughly the grounding of Morrison's work in African cosmogonies. Zauditu-Selassie's many readings of Ba Kongo and Yoruba spiritual presence in Morrison's work are incomparably detailed and generally convincing."--Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. K. Zauditu-Selassie delves deeply into African spiritual traditions, clearly explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a comprehensive, tour-de-force critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison is the most comprehensive. Zauditu-Selassie explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. Zauditu-Selassie is uniquely positioned to write this book, as she is not only a literary critic but also a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and nonfiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.

Author : Nadra Nittle
Publisher : Augsburg Fortress Publishers
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021-10-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781506471518

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Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision by Nadra Nittle Pdf

Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision unpacks an oft-ignored but essential element of her work--her religion--and in so doing gives readers a deeper, richer understanding of her life and her writing. Nadra Nittle's wide-ranging, deep exploration of Morrison's oeuvre reveals the role of religion and spirituality in her life and literature.

Author : Toni Morrison
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2002-04-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780375415357

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Sula by Toni Morrison Pdf

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Author : Anne Margaret Castro
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2020-01-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813943466

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The Sacred Act of Reading by Anne Margaret Castro Pdf

From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas. By engaging with spiritual traditions such as Vodou, Kumina, and Protestant Christianity while drawing on canonical Eurocentric literary theory, Anne Margaret Castro presents a novel, nuanced reading of power through the physical and metaphysical relationships portrayed in these great works of New World black literature. Castro examines prophecy in the dramas of Derek Walcott, preaching in the ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, and liturgy in the novels of Toni Morrison, offering comparative readings alongside the works of Afro-Colombian anthropologist Manuel Zapata Olivella, Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber, and Canadian fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. The Sacred Act of Reading is the first book to bring together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for thinking within, against, and beyond structures of political dominance, dependence, and power.

Author : Maha Marouan
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2020-07-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0814256635

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Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits by Maha Marouan Pdf

Author : La Vinia Delois Jennings
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2010-12-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521173396

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Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa by La Vinia Delois Jennings Pdf

Toni Morrison's fiction has been read as a contribution to and critique of Western civilization and Christianity. La Vinia Jennings reveals the fundamental role African traditional religious symbols play in her work. Based on extensive research into West African religions and philosophy, Jennings uncovers and interprets the African themes, images and cultural resonances in Morrison's fiction. She shows how symbols brought to the Americas by West African slaves are used by Morrison in her landscapes, interior spaces, and the bodies of her characters. Jennings's analysis of these symbols shows how a West African collective worldview informs both Morrison's work, and contemporary African-American life and culture. This important contribution to Morrison studies will be of great interest to scholars of African-American literature.

Author : Toni Morrison
Publisher : Everyman's Library
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2006-10-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307264886

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Beloved by Toni Morrison Pdf

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Author : K. Zauditu-Selassie
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2024-01-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9798218353926

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The Second Line by K. Zauditu-Selassie Pdf

The year is 1929. The place is Los Angeles, a segregated city as race-restrictive as the Deep South. There are three things that are very clear to Viola. First, her sister Iola is in grave spiritual trouble and needs assistance. Second, she, herself, needs to make some major life changes despite the myriad obstacles standing in her way. Third, she must bring her two nieces to New Orleans to begin their initiations, or they will suffer the same fate as Iola. The Second Line is an intergenerational story of spiritual adventure that vibrantly weaves through the shadows of a family's fight for survival, power, and legacy. About the Author K. Zauditu Selassie received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Baltimore and the Doctor of Arts degree from Clark Atlanta University and is a retired Professor of English. She is the author of an award-winning book of literary criticism, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison. She has traveled the world from Compton to Cairo, from Bamako to Baltimore, and Addis to Atlanta, collecting stories along the way. A word whisperer, her literary imagination is peopled by: sex workers, women adept in making poison, root women, astral travelers, shape-shifters, maroons, and lonely widows in search of sexual satisfaction. She is a priest of Obàtálá in the Lukumi Yoruba tradition and a descendant of a matrilineal group of Hoodoo believers from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Author : Therese E. Higgins
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2014-05-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317794189

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Religiosity, Cosmology and Folklore by Therese E. Higgins Pdf

This book presents background information on the beliefs, customs, traditions and cosmologies of several of Africa's foremost peoples, relates these findings to each of Morrison's seven novels by highlighting the connections between the African root and the African-American product, and elucidates how this connection helps to understand and to clarify many of Morrison's allusions to the culture out of which she writes. It presents a new way of reading Morrison's work that has been previously overlooked, and moves beyond just African-American culture, delving into Africa and its people.

Author : David L. Middleton
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2016-01-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317954293

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Toni Morrison's Fiction by David L. Middleton Pdf

This collection of contemporary criticism explores her concern with racial and gender issues and analyzes her in relation to other major modern authors, her philosophical and religious speculations, and her preoccupation with the process of fiction-making. These classics provide a broad look at critical argument about Toni Morrison's meanings and significance during the past 10 years. From the formative effects of learning one's Otherness as a result of majority perception, to the apocalyptic implications of racial memory, to the moral and psychologically constructive act of storytelling, to the structural function served by improvisational jazz music, to the imagery associated with both flight and naming, to the uniquely female experience of community-major issues raised by Morrison's body of work are explicated here.

Author : Connor, Marc C.
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2010-01-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1604736798

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The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison by Connor, Marc C. Pdf

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined as sagas illuminating history, race, culture, and gender politics. This gathering of eight essays by top scholars probes Morrison's novels and her growing body of nonfiction and critical work for the complex and potent aesthetic elements that have made her a major American novelist of the twentieth century. Through traditional aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the grotesque, through issues of form, narrative, and language, and through questions of affect and reader response, the nine essays in this volume bring into relief the dynamic and often overlooked range within Morrison's writing. Employing aesthetic ideas that range from the ancient Greeks to contemporary research in the black English oral tradition, The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison shows the potency of these ideas for interpreting Morrison's writing. This is a force Morrison herself has often suggested in her claims that Greek tragedy bears a striking similarity to "Afro-American communal structures." At the same time each essay attends to the ways in which Morrison also challenges traditional aesthetic concepts, establishing the African American and female voices that are essential to her sensibility. The result is a series of readings that simultaneously expands our understanding of Morrison's work and also provokes new thinking about an aesthetic tradition that is nearly 2,500 years old. These essays offer a rich complement to the dominant approaches in Morrison scholarship by revealing aspects of her work that purely ideological approaches have obscured or about which they have remained oddly silent. Each essay focuses particularly on the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical in Morrison's writing and between the artistic production and its role in the world at large. These relations show the rich political implications that aesthetic analysis engenders. By treating both Morrison's fiction and her nonfiction, the essays reveal a mind and imagination that have long been intimately engaged with the questions and traditions of the aesthetic domain. The result is a provocative and original contribution to Morrison scholarship, and to scholarship in American letters generally.

Author : A. Yemisi Jimoh
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1572331720

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Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction by A. Yemisi Jimoh Pdf

Jimoh (English, U. of Arkansas-Fayetteville) investigates African American intracultural issues that inform a more broadly intertextual use of music in creating characters and themes in fiction by US black writers. Conventional close readings of texts, she argues, often miss historical-sociopolitical discourses that can illuminate African American narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author : Toni Morrison
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2014-03-11
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780804169882

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Paradise by Toni Morrison Pdf

The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times

Author : Nadra Nittle
Publisher : Fortress Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2021-10-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781506471525

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Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision by Nadra Nittle Pdf

When Toni Morrison died in August 2019, she was widely remembered for her contributions to literature as an African American woman, an identity she wore proudly. Morrison was clear that she wrote from a Black, female perspective and for others who shared her identity. But just as much as she was an African American writer, Toni Morrison was a woman of faith. Morrison filled her novels with biblical allusions, magic, folktales, and liberated women, largely because Christianity, African American folk magic, and powerful women defined her own life. She grew up with family members who could interpret dreams, predict the future, see ghosts, and go about their business. Her relatives, particularly her mother, were good storytellers, and her family's oral tradition included ghost stories and African American folktales. But her family was also Christian. As a child, Morrison converted to Catholicism and chose a baptismal name that truly became her own--Anthony, from St. Anthony of Padua--going from Chloe to Toni. Morrison embraced both Catholicism and the occult as a child and, later, as a writer. She was deeply religious, and her spirituality included the Bible, the paranormal, and the folktales she heard as a child. Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision unpacks this oft-ignored, but essential, element of Toni Morrison's work--her religion--and in so doing, gives readers a deeper, richer understanding of her life and her writing. In its pages, Nadra Nittle remembers and understands Morrison for all of who she was: a writer, a Black woman, and a person of complex faith. As Nittle's wide-ranging, deep exploration of Morrison's oeuvre reveals, to fully understand the writing of Toni Morrison one must also understand the role of religion and spirituality in her life and literature.

Author : Houston A. Baker (Jr.),Patricia Redmond
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 1989-10-30
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0226035379

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Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s by Houston A. Baker (Jr.),Patricia Redmond Pdf

Featuring the work of the most distinguished scholars in the field, this volume assesses the state of Afro-American literary study and projects a vision of that study for the 1990s. "A rich and rewarding collection."—Choice. "This diverse and inspired collection . . . testifies to the Afro-Am academy's extraordinary vitality."—Voice Literary Supplement