Toni Morrison - by Yvette Christiansë (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered, and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience. In foregrounding the ethics of fiction writing, the book resists any triumphalist reading of Morrison's achievement in order to allow the meditative, unsettled, and unsettling questions that arise throughout her long labor at the nexus of language and politics, where her fiction interrogates representation itself.

Moving between close reading and critical theory, Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics reveals the ways in which Morrison's primary engagement with language has been a search for how and what language is made to communicate, and for how and what speaks in and from generation to generation. There is no easy escape from such legacy, no escape into a pure language free of the burdens of racialized agendas. Rather, there is the example of Morrison's commitment to writerly, which is to say readerly, wakefulness.

At a time when sustained study devoted to single authors has become rare, this book will be an invaluable resource for readers, scholars, and teachers of Morrison's work.

Review Quotes

Christianse's Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics is an exceptional, even singular contribution to what has by now become a rather voluminous scholarly literature on Morrison's work. Given its critical acuity and its unparalleled breadth (treating all of Morrison's fiction through the 2008 novel A Mercy), Christianse's book will be an invaluable resource and scholarly model for those teaching and writing about Morrison.---Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University

About the Author

Yvette Christainsë is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University and Visiting Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of two books of poetry. Her debut novel Unconfessed (Other Press, 2007) was a finalist for the Hemingway/PEN Prize for first fiction and a recipient of a 2007 ForeWord Magazine BEA Award. In addition, it was shortlisted
for the University of Johannesburg Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008.