- "Toni Morrison’s Depiction of the City in Jazz," by G. Neelakantan
Joe V. Yeldho
(2006) [Toni Morrison] (100%)
The authors illustrate how “Jazz powerfully captures a vision of an urban locale in which racial spaces are viscerally demarcated for the blacks through long conditioning, though in reality no physical marker separates the white and black worlds.” This “traumatic awareness of their pariah status makes the blacks in Toni Morrison’s Jazz perpetually reposition themselves.”
- "A New ‘Romen’ Empire: Toni Morrison's Love and the Classics," by Tessa Roynon
(2007) [Toni Morrison] (100%)
Roynon examines the “ambivalent relationship with classical tradition” in Morrison’s novels and suggests that “Morrison repeatedly subverts the central role that Greece and Rome have played in American self-definition and historiography.”
- "William Faulkner Reprised: Isolation in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon," by Lorie Watkins Fulton
(2004-05) [Toni Morrison] (100%)
Reads Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon through the lens of her master’s thesis chapter on William Faulkner and suggests that, in the character of Milkman Dead, she more hopefully re-envisions Quentin’s dilemma in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!.
- "‘Dragon Daddies and False-Hearted Men’: Patriarchy in Toni Morrison’s Love," by V. Sathyaraj
G. Neelakantan
(2005) [Toni Morrison] (100%)
The authors read Love as Morrison’s “powerful statement on the stark reality of female subjugation by an insidious patriarchy” that the authors liken to a “death-driven horror.”
- "Immigration and Labor Patterns in Toni Morrison’s Sula," by V. Sathyaraj
G. Neelakantan
(2007) [Toni Morrison] (100%)
Examines Morrison’s “meticulous recording of the steady gains made by the African Americans in the occupational industry during the post-World War II period” as depicted in Sula.
- "Family and Parenting in Toni Morrison’s Love," by V. Sathyaraj
G. Neelakantan
(2006) [Toni Morrison] (100%)
The authors read Morrison’s Love as “a powerful defense of the centrality of family and parental affiliation which make a significant difference to the physical and psychic well-being of children.” They determine that, in “analyzing the life stories of Romen and Junior, the novelist rediscovers with insight and clarity the supreme role of family and parents in shaping responsible individuals/citizens.”
- "A Review of Justine Tally’s The Story of Jazz : Toni Morrison’s Dialogic Imagination," by Alan Rice
(2003) [Toni Morrison] (83%)
Rice describes Tally as a “a conscientious critic” who examines “much of the previous criticisms of Jazz before moving to a forthright negotiation of the novel in relation to an admirably clear exposition of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of storytelling and the dialogic.” However, Rice adds that "jazz critics such as Paul Berliner (on improvisation) and Ingrid Monson (on antiphony) would have been useful here and their absence means that the book’s value as a commentary on the cultural context of Morrison’s work on promulgating the importance of jazz is rather undermined.”
- ""A Direction of One’s Own": Alienation in Mrs. Dalloway and Sula," by Lorie Watkins Fulton
(2006) [Toni Morrison] (77%)
Toni Morrison’s reading of Mrs. Dalloway in her master’s thesis informs Sula’s approach to the concept of alienation.
- Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, by Elliott Butler-Evans
(1989) [MISCELLANEOUS] (43%)
Examines “the relationship between two conflicting discourses--one an inscription of race, the other found in gender”--in the fiction of these writers. Their “fictive discourse” is “often the site of dissonance, ruptures . . . a kind of narrative violence generated by . . . articulations of . . . distinct and often contending expressions of desire.”
- "To Cheer the Weary Traveler: Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and History," by Joseph Brown
(1996) [William Faulkner] (34%)
Compares Morrison's Song of Solomon and Absalom, Absalom!--both “studies in the remembering of ancestors.” Whereas Faulkner's heroes “must suffer . . . defeat and each of his heroes does suffer it,” Morrison's achieve “something larger than innocence, something more noble than resignation. The achievement is holiness.”
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