This capstone course takes as it archive several works of fiction and
nonfiction by Toni Morrison, a slice of the voluminous secondary
literature on Morrison, and a range of theoretical texts, in order to ask
a set of literary, political, historical, and theoretical question.
These questions include: how do Morrison's texts register and respond to
the continuities and breaks marking the history of race in the U.S.? How
do these texts theorize and evidence the intersectionality of race,
gender, and class? What are the formal, aesthetic, performative, and
representational strategies imbuing Morrison's work? How are questions of
memory, history, and geography opened up by her works? How do these
relate to broader transformations in form seen across the post-civil
rights moment? How do these texts enable us to think about the relation
between the post-civil rights and post-modern eras? We will attempt to
read Morrison and her interlocutors as bound up in both the critical
destabilizing work her texts have engendered for U.S. literary canon
formation, and her recent incorporation into precisely such a national
canon. Novels will include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Jazz, and A
Mercy; also, Playing in the Dark and Morrison's writing on Clarence
Thomas and OJ Simpson.