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- Sundman, Alice, 1966-
(författare)
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Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores the writing of place in Toni Morrison’s fiction, focusing primarily on the novels Beloved (1987), Paradise (1998), and A Mercy (2008). It analyses particular instances of written places in these works in a twofold way, namely, how place is foregrounded through literary means in the text and how place has emerged in a process of shaping. Through an exploration of the conjunction of text and avant-texte, that is, of published texts as well as manuscripts, in an analysis combining close reading and genetic criticism, the study investigates how certain moments of place are shaped in processes of writing and presented in the published version of the text. Drawing on archival material in the Toni Morrison Papers at Princeton University Library and exploring the literary foregrounding of place both in its genesis and in its published textual form, the study supplements previous research and gives new insights into Morrison’s writing of place. The investigation is carried out in four chapters, of which the first presents a selective overview of place in Morrison’s oeuvre, giving an outline of the geographical locations of her main fictional places as well as insights into the writing of some placial moments in her fiction. This is followed by three in-depth analyses, focusing on the three selected novels. The analysis of Beloved shows that the idea of joining that runs through the text is placial; moreover, drafts indicate that this idea was planned to conclude the novel, thus emphasising it as a central textual feature of the novel. The study of Paradise suggests that places in the novel both stem from and present processes of transformation. This is underscored by textual features such as contrasts, paradoxical images, and by the inclusion of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé as a transformational force. The chapter on A Mercy engages with how place is foregrounded through the characters’ placial relations and through literary allusion. Florens’s writing on the walls and the floor of Jacob Vaark’s third house forms the house into a place of articulation in its dual sense of joining and expression. Manuscripts indicate an increasing emphasis in the writing process on the house as the site of inscription and a shift in intertextual resonances from the canonical male author William Faulkner to the first published African American woman Phillis Wheatley. Through these analyses, the study seeks to demonstrate the manifold ways in which Toni Morrison shapes her fictional places into meaningful literary elements.
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| 2. |
- Han, Gül Bilge, 1984-
(författare)
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“Distantly a part”: Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores the social and political dimensions of aesthetic autonomy as it is given formal expression in Wallace Stevens’s poetry of the 1930s and the early 1940s. Whereas modernist claims to autonomy are often said to rest upon an ideological assertion of art’s detachment from socio-historical concerns, I argue that, in Stevens’s work, autonomy is conceived in relational terms, which gives rise to new lines of interconnection between his poetry and its cultural situation. Written over a period when the political efficacy of literature became a staple of discussion among a myriad of writers and critics, Stevens’s poetry offers an understanding of autonomy not as an escape from, but as a productive condition for imagining alternative forms of engagement with the historical crisis with which it has to reckon. In taking into account the cultural context from which Stevens’s poetics of autonomy emerged, my study aims to highlight the significance of the concept to the poet’s exploration of the tension between aesthetic and social domains, to his imaginative formations of collective agency, and to the vexed relationship between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking. By transposing the theoretical discussion of autonomy into the register of historical scrutiny, I hope to pave the way for a rethinking of autonomy and its relevance to the period’s radical and modernist writing, literary debates, and cultural politics. For this purpose, I draw on recent theories, such as those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, on poetry, politics, and (in)aesthetics, which serve to complicate the working definitions of modernist autonomy as literature’s immunity from the world, and to indicate an alternative path for analyzing its critical and contextual implications.
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