Word: morrison
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These models provide a beginning. Learn from the experiences of others also. People like Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. DuBois, whose works resonate for us as people of color. And most importantly, learn from what writers like Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan show us of the ways in which our sisters view us (views which perhaps we might not always like seeing...
Novelist Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize...
Those who do not find Song of Solomon Morrison's best book almost invariably choose Beloved (1987), an intricate, layered, harrowing story about what an escaped slave did to save her child from bondage and the rippling effects of this act through many years and lives. In 1988, after Beloved had been passed over by judges for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle, a group of 48 black authors signed and sent a letter to the New York Times Book Review complaining that Morrison had never won an NBA or a Pulitzer Prize. The gesture...
...such reservations should attend Morrison's Nobel. The Swedish Academy sometimes works in mysterious ways, but it cannot be lobbied. It made an honorable, correct choice in Morrison, but probably for at least one wrong reason. In the statement explaining Morrison's selection, the academy wrote, in part, "She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race." This is wrong, as have been the many critics over the years who have praised Morrison for "transcending" the ( blackness of her characters and bestowing on them an abstract universality that everyone can understand...
...practice -- and this is the great lesson that her fiction has to teach -- Morrison does just the reverse. White authors are seldom praised for "transcending" the whiteness of their characters, and Morrison has demanded, through the undeniable power of her works, to be judged by the same standards. She has insisted upon the particular racial identities of her fictional people -- black women and men under stresses peculiar to them and their station in the U.S. -- because she knows a truth about literature that seems in danger of passing from civilized memory. The best imaginative writing is composed of specifics rather...