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Flashcards in Beloved: General Deck (22)
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1
Q

In ‘The Salon Interview’, Toni Morrison says she doesn’t write any certain ‘ist’ novels - ie. ‘feminist’ - what does she say that she strives towards?

A

“leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity”

2
Q

When was Beloved published?

A

1987 - set after the American Civil War (1861–1865)

3
Q

Who is the story based on?

A

ex-slave Margaret Garner

4
Q

How does Morrison’s story work as an act of revision?

A
  • she desires to “invent her life” external to the dominant condemnatory discourses around her act of infanticide
  • might call these the frameworks of power/ authority
5
Q

When did metafiction emerge?

A

1960s

6
Q

Why does Sethe not directly confront her own trauma?

A
  • E. Priya: she attempts to erase the trauma “from the psyche in order for the psyche to cope”
7
Q

What is the Lockean formulation of personal identity?

A
  • that the “basis of personal identity” is derived from a “unity of consciousness”
  • basically states that if the individual has memories of their previous state of being then it confirms that they have retained the same consciousness and are thus the ‘same person’ even if the body changes
8
Q

What does Paul D struggle with according to Thomas M. Linehan?

A
  • struggles to reconcile that “a man or woman preserves the same psychological identity in both cases, slave or free”
  • because this forces Sethe into a spiral of indefatigable guilt
9
Q

How does Paul D reconcile his struggle with the Lockean formulation of personal identity?

A
  • comes to see that the “‘I’ during and after slavery should be considered different entities”
  • even if Sethe retains the unity of consciousness across her memory - this does not mean that she maintains the same personal identity because the psychological trauma of slavery provokes a suspension of the normal conditions of her personal identity
10
Q

How could Beloved be considered a work of historiographic metafiction?

A

Morrison reassesses the artificiality of historical discourse

11
Q

Who had the power to define?

A

“definition belonged to the definers - not the defined”

12
Q

After WW2, the mass media became the dominant mode of mimetic representation - in reaction, the postmodern metafictional novel relinquishes the representation of the real to that media and turns to the philosophical and ethical questions of what representation essentially is - how is this reflected in Beloved?

A
  • questions the very basis of moral law

- asks us instead to empathise with the application of situational ethics

13
Q

What became unhinged in American authors post-1945?

A
  • faith in mimesis and what a “reality” unmediated by images, language, and ideology could be
14
Q

Most people might resist the label of ‘black writer’ but Morrison embraces it - what did she say?

A

“I’m writing for black people”

15
Q

Who came up with ‘historiographic metafiction’?

A

Linda Hutcheon

16
Q

Postmodernist texts don’t just return to the past - what do they do?

A
  • not just a nostalgic return to the past but a “critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of both art and society”
17
Q

What is the contradiction of historiographic metafiction?

A
  • that it must work within the framework of history while subverting/ questioning it
18
Q

How does postmodernism differentiate between ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’?

A
  • ‘difference’ is not the same as ‘otherness’ - identifies that postmodernist culture contradicts dominant/ liberal humanist culture because its version of ‘difference’ is aways multiple and provisional
19
Q

What is the difference between modernism and postmodernism in relation to metanarratives?

A
  • modernists were considered humanistic, and they held a paradoxical desire for stable aesthetic and moral values while also realising the impossibility of this
    (sincerity)
  • postmodernism refuses to appeal to such structure/meta-narrative such as art or myth that was consolatory for modernists
    (cynicism)
20
Q

What is the purpose of historiographic metafiction?

A

to demonstrate that “our culture is not really the homogenous monolith (male, white, Western) that we might have assumed”

21
Q

How does Morrison ‘transpose’ Garner?

A
  • transposes Garner into a fictional realm in which her voice can be foregrounded and “a little ambiguity” improves upon historical dogma
22
Q

Why does Morrison utilise Derrida?

A
  • because the message becomes that that to decentralise the stabilising signifier, the potentially marginalised signified can inhabit new meanings