(Im)Possibilities

Despite having the syllabus all semester and never hearing anything about it, I assumed for the majority of the course that there would be some kind of big analytical paper about Toni Morrison’s trilogy to do at the end. I had this imaginary assignment in the back of my head for months and I was certain that I would write this paper about Toni Morrison’s structure and organization, as it is what has stood out to me most in all of the novels we’ve covered.

I guess since I can’t have a whole paper, I’ll do some here. I think I’ve already made some posts about structure, but what can I say… I’m a fan of how Morrison uses it.

None of the books we read were perfectly linear; we’d get bits and pieces along the way and there never seemed to be a clear “present” time. We’ve talked during this semester about the unreliability of Morrison’s narrators. Though Morrison’s narrators seem Continue reading “Morrison, Dante and Structure”

One of the first things that struck me about Morrison’s Paradise when I first held it in my hands was the sticker on the front referencing Oprah’s book club. While we have had incredible discussions on Paradise this semester, it led me to wonder how the book was received by non-academic readers–people reading Morrison’s work for fun, outside of the classroom atmosphere we have grown used to.  Continue reading “Morrison’s Paradise: Online, and Beyond”

As I was astounded by how little work has been done regarding Morrison’s Paradise, I looked up my thesis regarding the women’s scenes in “Save-Marie”, and eventually landed on an article discussing some quotes from Morrison herself, regarding the novel’s conception.

As it turns out, Paradise was not the original title- “Paradise just hit bookstores, but Morrison wanted to call it War. It begins with a six-shot staccato sentence: ‘They kill the white girl first.’ Explains Morrison, ‘I wanted to open with somebody’s finger on the trigger, to close when it was pulled, and to have the whole novel exist in that moment of the decision to kill or not.’ Knopf feared the title War might turn off Morrison fans. ‘I’m still not convinced they were right,’ she says.”

Additionally, Morrison was interested in why “Paradise necessitates exclusion.” This, coupled with her interest in naming the novel War, seems to me particularly interesting given the militant clothing and possessions of the women in the end of the novel. Morrison possibly was pointing to the human desperation to get into an exclusionary paradise, and the idea of such a place in and of itself creates violence. This violence appears to be done by those who disagree with one another on who exactly is to be excluded. Thus, the men kill the convent women because they deem them “other,” and redefine Hell based on what they believe is undesireable traits; this violence seems to foreshadow future violence as the women come back prepared to “shoulder the burden,” down in “paradise”.

I think the main idea is that Morrison explores the violence associated with the idea of exclusion.

The short article can be found here:

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/engl52a/engl52a.1999/morrison.html

While discussing threads/patterns/images/etc. in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Dante’s Paradiso this week, Emily brought up the idea of working to “unlearn.” Our group applied this to multiple facets of the society we live in today, including our ideas of race and gender. After class, I started to think about unlearning in relation to the way we look at women’s bodies and how that gaze affects the individual woman. The more I thought about it, I came to realize that this is something Morrison also addresses in her novel The Bluest Eye. Continue reading “Morrison and Unlearning Women’s Bodies”

Hi all,

I came across this piece today and the way the poet talks about dance/music reminds me of Morrison’s Jazz. Continue reading “Slam Poetry – “Slay””

We have been working diligently, putting our creative minds to work in drawing connections between Dante’s Paradiso and Morrison’s Paradise. In our most recent class days working on the final project, the word “comedy” came up a few times, and bounced around my head for a while. Of course it was partially because we were working with the Divine Comedy, but the word continued to bounce around when we were drawing connections to Paradise and African-American writing, so I figured there must be a connection. There was.

The word “comedy” Continue reading “Comedy – Isn’t that funny?”

In reading Linda Krumholz’s essay “Reading and Insight in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” on Wednesday, I was struck by her connection of the Ruby residents in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and the biblical Adam and Eve during the Fall from Eden. A concept that has been percolating in my mind since taking an African American Literature class with Dr. Beth in the spring is “repetition and revision.” Krumholz states that in Paradise, Morrison “considers what the danger of repetition without difference might be” (21). While I can see what Krumholz is saying here, I also see repetition with revision in Paradise. Morrison subverts the gender norms of equating male with God and female with sin through the men of Ruby and the women of the Convent. These two interpretations depend on which perspective the reader taps into. Continue reading “Revising the Paradisaical Fall”