"This comparison is not hyperbole or irony: as the Nobel Prize winning author of iconic books like Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Jazz, Morrison's oeuvre has a magnitude and depth that few writers have ever touched. Her work has investigated the long afterlife of American slavery, the formation (and deformation) of community and family, and the jagged edges of love and desire with a strangeness and precision entirely her own."
"Instead of reducing Morrison to the tidy formulas and categories into which Black women writers are so often sorted, Serpell embraces the complicatedness and variation of Morrison's genius, arguing that the difficulty and ambiguity of her texts is, precisely, their point, though not to the extent that they hold readers out. Instead, inspired by those iconic images of Morrison at a disco in 1974, Serpell explains that Morrison invites us into the difficulty, to sweat it out and take pleasure in doing so."
Toni Morrison's fiction commands unmatched magnitude and depth. Her work probes the long afterlife of American slavery, the formation and deformation of community and family, and the jagged edges of love and desire with singular strangeness and precision. Much writing about her work reduces its complexity into tidy categories that fail to meet its demands. The difficulty and ambiguity present in the texts function as deliberate aesthetic strategies that require active engagement rather than exclusion. Morrison's approach invites readers into that difficulty, asking them to grapple with language, moral complexity, and the pleasure of sustained interpretation.
#toni-morrison #literary-criticism #ambiguity-and-difficulty #afterlife-of-slavery #black-womens-literature
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