Evaluated Thoughts

Friday, May 27, 2011

Exploring Project Muse to find themes in Toni Morrison’s novels

I explored Project Muse to see what kind of articles I could find that discuss the themes in Morrison’s literature, particularly themes that would demonstrate her role as an author today.

Project Muse is an on-line resource that helps you find biographies, interviews, and scholarly articles about specific works or specific authors.

I was new to using Project Muse, so I went to their basic search and searched “Toni AND Morrison”—I only narrowed it by designating that she was a female author. I found a lot of great articles, and one in particularly that is a comparative piece discussing a common theme in three of her books, one being the book I am focusing on for this project.

A Blessing and a Burden: The Relation to the Past in Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved

Deborah Guth

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 39, Number 3&4, Fall/Winter 1993, pp. 575-596 (Article)

This article was interesting to me because I liked seeing the discussion about the importance of the past in Song of Solomon, because I feel like it connects to Morrison’s mission as a female African American writer.

The article discusses some of the many issues that inhabit Toni Morrison's fiction: one of them being the multifaceted and often problematic relationship of the present to the past. Whether she explores a love-affair or a girlhood friendship, generational rupture or the meaning of freedom—whether she uses the model of communal story-telling to shape her work, reactivates a traditional myth or explores the dynamics of memory—the impact of the past remains a central issue, wending its way through theme and form. For Morrison, the questions: "Who am I?" and "Where are we going?" are inseparable from "Where do we come from?", and the two sides—the search for self-definition and an understanding of what the past is about—interact constantly throughout her work

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