Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different.Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity-and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her.Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize.GuardianSo charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry New York TimesI imagine if our greatest American novelist, William Faulkner, were alive today he would herald Toni Morrison's emergence as a kindred spirit. Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is the rarest of pleasures Washington PostThe Bluest Eye is a fine book, a lament for all starved and stunted children everywhere Daily TelegraphMorrison's style rivets the reader.her synaesthetic, often rhythmic, even chanting prose recalls both Faulkner and Emily Dickinson The Times Literary SupplementToni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her GuardianThis story commands attention, for it contains one black girl's universe NewsweekA profoundly successful work of fiction.This is, of course, the story of a little girl who is totally remade by a story that’s told to her, and I just want to point this out to you, on page 182 of The Bluest Eye. This novel has a lot to do with the questions that John Barth was thinking about, in a very different register, in Lost in the Funhouse. Morrison’s Politics: The Other Side of the 1960s Professor Amy Hungerford: So, today we will talk about The Bluest Eye. The American Novel Since 1945 ENGL 291 - Lecture 13 - Toni Morrison, The Bluest EyeChapter 1. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That's why she told her stories.
So of course the dog dies, and this convinces Pecola that her prayers have been answered, and it pushes her over the edge in to something like schizophrenia. And, of course, what he has given her to give to the dog is poison. He has, remember, tricked Pecola in to thinking that if something happens to the dog that he sends her out to feed, it will be a sign that God has answered her prayer for blue eyes. No one else will see her blue eyes, but she will, and she will live happily ever after. I gave her two blue eyes, cobalt blue, a streak of it, right out of Your own blue heaven. I played You,” he says to God, “and it was a very good show. ![]() ![]() Drop acid that’s the thing you should be doing. “Turn your back on the war,” says Ken Kesey. And there was the counterculture gaining steam, advocating a playful engagement with the world that would be uninterested in questions like the Vietnam War. Just without going into biography or psychology, we’re going to think about how the novel presents itself as doing a kind of work in the world that Barth’s writing never tries to do. Why is literature her chosen venue? Now, I’m sure there are a thousand reasons, but we’re going to–I’m going to–bring some of them out of the novel that we can read right there. One of our questions today is going to be: Why does Toni Morrison, in 1970, sit down to write a novel, instead of a tract? Why is she interested in literature, as opposed to something like sociology? She has such a strong and passionate desire for justice for African Americans. Choosing a Form: Morrison’s Use of the Novel So, Morrison takes the insights of Barth, and she turns them to political purpose. So, this produces a cultural politics, the cultural politics of the late ’60s and into the ’70s, and I would say even up through the culture wars of the 1990s.This is the legacy of the 1960s in literature. So it merges the cultural focus of the counterculture–that’s why it’s called the counter culture it produces a culture against the prevailing culture–and that politically activist body of thought coming out of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement in the ’60s. This is an effort to let the voice of the unheard speak through her fiction. This is a very obvious example of how that works in Morrison’s fiction. Now it takes a very particular form, and if you think to the passages about Pauline, there is the section on Pecola’s mother, Pauline, where we see large blocks of italics of her voice coming to us. This is the first of the reasons: to hold the human in suspension in the novel. And Pynchon is interested in certain kinds of essences–like dandelion wine, or tears, or the sailor’s mattress–that hold in them, in suspension, the cycles and movements of human life.Morrison has that same desire to hold the human in her fiction, and so this is one reason why Morrison chooses the novel. So, a second question that I want to get at today is, given that commonality–Remember, I ended my lecture on Pynchon by arguing that sentiment remained important in Pynchon’s work despite all that word play, all that self-conscious irony of the story, all that humor at the level of names, what really finally mattered was not that search for meaning, but the moment when you could touch another human being. ![]() If you haven’t read it, I would suggest that you do. Why did Morrison suddenly turn to those italicized blocks? And, I don’t know if you read the– I think you have the postscript, the afterword, that Morrison appended to this edition of the novel. You might find, and I have to admit I myself find, that particular example quite clunky in a literary sense. Fiction, because it is imaginative, gives you a way to get at what academics of the traditional kind cannot transmit about the past, but also, in this novel, about a life that is closer to her current moment, the moment of writing.So, by including Pauline’s voice, she allows Pauline to begin to tell her own story of how she became married to Cholly Breedlove and how she evolved in to the fairly hateful woman that we see her to be when we see her as Pecola’s mother. Torrent movies bollywood downloadAnd you see that, for example, when the women are gathered around Aunt Jimmy’s bed, and they’re talking as she is in her final sickness. So, it’s unsatisfying to her, but there are more successful versions of it. She writes the afterword in 1993. She herself finds it clunky from the perspective of twenty years later. Chipset family controllerIt’s one of the great strengths of her writing is that ability to embody the voice. There are just many dozens of these examples, so any time you hear a character begin to speak, you have that sense that you’re hearing something that you wouldn’t otherwise hear if Morrison was not there to open your ear to it and to embody those voices. That’s one example of how those voices come into the novel.
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