Toni Morrison |
Michael K. JohnsonCall for papers: Collection of essays on Toni Morrison's prose and fictionReading Toni Morrison: Students Writing on Race, Culture, and IdentityJami L. Carlacio is currently soliciting contributions from undergraduate university students for a collection of essays on the work of Toni Morrison. Essays may come from a variety of disciplines, including history, American Studies, English, and Rhetoric. This project affirms the central importance of Morrison's contribution to American letters in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As we already know, scholarship on Morrison numbers in the hundreds of essays and full-length texts, but the attention paid to this Nobel Laureate has come from professional scholars, not from undergraduates who have done some insightful and provocative work on her. I intend for this anthology, tentatively titled Reading Toni Morrison: Students Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity, to showcase the excellent work that students have done that calls attention to Morrison's contribution to American culture—particularly our relationship to the history of racism as well as to identity and cultural politics. This anthology will demonstrate to future undergraduate students the possibility of producing capable, informed, and stimulating scholarship on Morrison's fiction and prose and will function as a pedagogical model for other students who are writing on or reading her. This anthology may also offer those who teach Morrison ideas about how to approach reading, writing, and discussing her. |
Completed essays that address the following topics are invited:
- How the themes of literacy, identity, and whiteness function in Morrison's Nobel Lecture, "Site of Memory,"and/or Playing in the Dark, and several of the novels.
- Morrison's Nobel Lecture as it explores whether language is living or dead, and what its limitations are if it is dead. If language is "a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency, as an act with consequences," then how might we use language is to tell stories, to make sense of our lives?
- How Morrison complicates our reading by revising traditional, linear narrative structures to create a multi-vocal text that complicates our understanding of history and highlights the importance of memory
- How such narrative structures illustrate the way memory operates in telling the past
- How Morrison uses the African folk tradition and stream of consciousness technique to illustrate how these work to complicate the dominant culture's account of slavery
- The role of journeys, both secular and spiritual
- The importance of storytelling and history in the shaping of a self, from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to maturity
- The meaning of selfhood, particularly the importance of maintaining it in the face of reductionist thinking and essentializing tendencies.
- The role of love, motherhood, and gender in several of Morrison's novels
- The importance of love and its multi-faceted definitions
- How Morrison uses characters in Beloved as a vehicle to explore the problematic nature of gender and gender roles in slavery
- How Morrison uses characters in Sula to explore the role of men in relationship to women
- The themes of violence, loss, and regeneration
- The role of history in fiction
- The role of racial self-loathing and its consequences
More options are welcome, including essays on any of Morrison's fiction and prose essays as well as her critical text, Playing in the Dark.
Submission guidelines
Please send completed and polished essays via e-mail attachment or hard copy (750–3000 words, or between three [minimum] to ten pages [maximum], with complete bibliographic citations) by November 30, 2004. Email submissions accepted only in as MS Word attachment.
Please adhere to citation guidelines outlined by MLA.
Essays will be reviewed blindly: submit essay and title page separately.
1) Submit essay with title but without your name as a separate document from the title page.
2) Submit title page with your name, the essay's title, and complete contact information to:
Dr. Jami L. Carlacio
English Department
Goldwin Smith 250
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853