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Manu and Dr. Abha Shukla Kaushik. "Existential Dilemma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." Creative Launcher 6, no. 3 (August 30, 2021): 110–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2021.6.3.22.
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Toni Morrison verbalizes in novel manners the pain and battle of a traumatized self and local area. In her novels, the traumatic truth of a dark self shows itself in the characters' self-hatred and self-disdain, and in the deficiency of their individual and cultural identity. Her fiction resolves issues of African American history, traumatizing experience and identity, often additionally captivating with inquiries of sex and sex, and, less significantly, class. When writing in a climate where everything except a couple of dark writers battled for acknowledgment, presently the subject of much recognition, Morrison’s work has provoked various and assorted basic reactions. The Beloved and Song of Solomon utilize the devices of disruption, corruption and sensuality to portray the traumatic encounters of the Black ladies’ heroes. During the last fifteen or so years grant treating the Morrison oeuvre has blossomed, making her clearly quite possibly the most talked about creators of the contemporary time frame. Toni Morrison’s In her novel, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison shows the overwhelming impacts of slavery and its specialist disasters as these impacts show themselves through numerous ages of one family. The trauma of slavery is with the end goal that nobody contacted by it can break liberated from the past, even a long time after actual freedom. This is valid for the novel's hero, Sethe, a once in the past oppressed lady living in Cincinnati after the Civil War and third novel Song of Solomon (1977) goes about as a milestone in her profession, since it uncovers the imaginative development she has acquired, and furthermore presents the arrangement she has observed to tackle the overwhelming issues she depicts in her initially traumatizing novel. The distinctive traumatic occasions make Morrison's novels appropriate for logo helpful perusing and examination.
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Sarinjeive, Devi. "Reading Paradigms, Toni Morrison,Beloved." Journal of Literary Studies 14, no. 3-4 (December 1998): 281–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02564719808530204.
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Aghakhani Shahrezaee, Mina, and Zahra Jannessari Ladani. "Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Bluest Eye: A Cultural Materialistic Approach." International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences 30 (June 2014): 17–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ilshs.30.17.
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This article aims to investigate two novels of Toni Morrison, Beloved and The Bluest Eye, by a cultural materialistic approach. Cultural materialists emphasize on the cultural aspects and elements of literary texts. They study issues such as race, gender, sexuality, social class, and slavery. In other words, they put under investigation the marginalized people of society, like black people, females, and slaves. In this regard, Toni Morrison is a great writer whose writings are replete with cultural issues. As most of the main characters of Toni Morrison's novels are black people, so it can be concluded that for her, marginalized people of society and minorities especially females, are at center. Therefore, in this paper, it is aimed to emphasize on cultural elements of Morrison's novels, Beloved and The Bluest Eye, and determine what stance she takes toward such minorities.
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Kangussu, Imaculada. "Medea as slave: on Toni Morrison´s beloved." Revista Archai, no. 21 (2017): 255–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/1984-249x_22_11.
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K. F, Princy, and Dr Suma Aleya John. "A Study of the Significance of Communion in Toni Morrison’s Novel Beloved." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 1 (January 10, 2020): 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i1.10342.
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The term ‘communion’ means sharing of thoughts and feelings. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines communion as a close relationship with someone in which feelings and thoughts are exchanged. Communion is a recognizable theme in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Beloved is set in the era of Reconstruction and explores the psychological state of African Americans and their struggles to rebuild themselves after the trauma of slavery. In Beloved, Toni Morrison shows communion as a remedy to recover from one’s past traumatic life. Most of the characters in Beloved are slaves or ex-slaves struggling to reconcile with their past. This paper aims to study how communion helps the characters to remember and share their past and how their close relationship with mutual understanding makes recovery possible. This paper also presents characters who encourage communion and discourage it. Through her novel Beloved, Morrison conveys the message that communion leads to a better life.
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Abula, Jelena. "PROBLEMATIKA MAJČINSTVA U ROMANU „VOLjENA“ TONI MORISON." Lipar 22, no. 74 (2021): 187–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.46793/lipar74.187a.
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This paper will examine the concept of motherhood in the light of black feminism in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Morrison, one of the most prominent writers of the 20th century, is trying to present the development of the African- American community and the institution of motherhood in a society characterized by meaningless divisions between race, class and gender. Slavery problematizes the concept of motherhood which represents a connection of conflicting views shaped by different attitudes towards race, gender and class. Therefore, Morrison uses the suppressed voices of African-American mothers to address the problematic concept of motherhood in slavery. The paper explores the complexity of slavery and its influence on motherhood, the powerful ideology through which the Afro-American tradition is transferred, and it also outlines motherhood as a dominant motif that connects the female characters in Beloved.
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Barnett, Pamela E. "Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 112, no. 3 (May 1997): 418–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/462950.
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The title character in Toni Morrison's Beloved embodies the history and memory of rape. In fact, her supernatural form is the shape-shifting witch, derived by African Americans from the succubus, a female rapist and nightmare figure of European myth. Beloved functions like a traumatic, repetitive nightmare: in addition to representing characters' repressed memories of rape, she attacks Sethe and Paul D. Morrison also uses the succubus figure to represent the effects of institutionalized rape during slavery. Beloved drains Sethe of vitality and Paul D of semen, and these violations represent dehumanization and commodified reproduction. Finally, by portraying a female rapist figure and a male rape victim, Morrison foregrounds race, rather than gender, as the crucial category determining the domination or rape of her African American characters.
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Kumar, S. Satish. "Call Her Beloved: A Lexicon for Abjection in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved." Literature 2, no. 2 (March 29, 2022): 47–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/literature2020005.
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What does it mean to mourn for the loss of lives that are rendered ungrievable by history? More importantly, with what language does one grieve the loss or despoliation of lives that are rendered ungrievable through disremembrance? This study reads such concerns as represented in two novels by Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Drawing on theorizations of the Other and the Abject in the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, respectively, the readings of Morrison’s novels presented here seek to conceptualize the impacts of racial and racist oppression as the fallout from experiences of othering in the extreme. Confronting the desecration of human life and dignity engendered through racism, the study argues, is a descent into abjection. Through exploring Morrison’s narrative project, as explained in her non-fiction, this study seeks to conceptualize a possible lexicon for grieving the Abject without appropriating it or in any way diminishing its specific and radical alterity as a despoiled being.
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Telehina, N. I., and O. T. Khrystuk. "THE ROLE OF CONTRAST IN TONI MORRISON “BELOVED”." Тrаnscarpathian Philological Studies 10, no. 2 (2019): 146–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.32782/tps2663-4880/2019.10-2.28.
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Durán Giménez-Rico, Isabel. "La tradición afroamericana en Beloved de Toni Morrison." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 2 (1989): 31–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/raei.1989.2.04.
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Tchaparian, Vicky. "Words Left Unspoken in the Lives of the Black." Armenian Folia Anglistika 12, no. 2 (16) (October 17, 2016): 63–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.46991/afa/2016.12.2.063.
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Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, represents a postmodern traumatic story the characters of which deal with black history and the scars it has left on the African American community. As Rafael Perez-Torres claims, “the story of slavery invoked by Beloved is built on the absence of power, the absence of selfdetermination, the absence of homeland, the absence of a language” (Perez-Torres 1993:131). Throughout the story T. Morrison gives a voice to a ghost to speak up, but she takes away the voice of the ghost’s mother who does not have the power to tell her story about her infanticide and so, has a troubled relationship with language. Later, Beloved’s sister, Denver, who becomes dumb and deaf after learning the story about her mother’s infanticide, gets back her senses when she goes to the community to ask for help to nurture her suffering mother. Although T. Morrison treats different themes, the following paper is an attempt to study the importance of language in Beloved, through comparing the Maternity symbolic order in Morrison to the Paternity symbolic order in Jacque Lacan’s The Psychoses (1955-1956).
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Silva, Luciana de Mesquita. "A LITERATURA DE TONI MORRISON NO BRASIL: BELOVED E SUAS PARATRADUÇÕES." Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada 59, no. 2 (August 2020): 987–1010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/01031813733411420200504.
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RESUMO Este artigo tem como objetivo abordar as traduções do romance Beloved (1987), de Toni Morrison, no Brasil, com foco em alguns de seus paratextos. Inicia-se com uma reflexão teórica sobre tradução que a considera como um processo que ultrapassa a transposição linguística entre o texto-fonte e o texto-meta, uma vez que envolve fatores sociais, históricos, culturais, ideológicos, entre outros. Em seguida, apresenta-se a teoria da paratradução, segundo a qual os paratextos que compõem uma obra traduzida são importantes elementos a serem examinados pelo pesquisador, já que contribuem para a construção de sentidos. Posteriormente, o artigo traz um breve panorama sobre Toni Morrison e sua produção literária, destacando Beloved, e prossegue com uma análise das capas e contracapas das diferentes edições de Amada, título da referida obra no Brasil. Por fim, verifica-se que, em geral, as paratraduções brasileiras de Beloved reforçam as imagens de Morrison como escritora premiada e do romance em questão como um livro aclamado pela crítica.
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Allen, John J. "On White Theology … and other Lies: Redemptive Communal Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." Literature and Theology 35, no. 3 (June 13, 2021): 285–308. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frab014.
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Abstract Toni Morrison’s Beloved can be read as a decidedly theological work, particularly in its expression of redemptive communal unity through narrative re-telling. Morrison’s imagined community in Beloved moves from fragmented isolation to liberative solidarity with each other, dramatically exemplifying a postcolonial theological vision, which draws from African traditional cultures. Although often rejected by some theological interpreters as ‘pop-gnostic’, Toni Morrison’s Beloved rejects a theological worldview of coloniality and offers instead a hybridised approach to theological meaning. In dispelling the racial ‘othering’ that frequently occurs in both literature and theology, Morrison crafts a theological narrative that retells the sinful past in the hope of transcending guilt for the sake of a harmonious future. Thus, the theological insight of Beloved is found in a syncretic cosmology that does not perpetuate colonial ontological categories but forges a communal narrative that is non-possessive and open to a future free from the shackles of the past. Morrison’s Beloved equips the theologian with pertinent questions, ones that wrestle with the presence of God within a suffering and oppressed community; these are timely questions that must be posed to the Christian tradition in order to transcend the lies of white theology.
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Villegas Salas, Lilia Irlanda. "Who’s loved in Beloved?" Revista Valenciana, estudios de filosofía y letras, no. 12 (December 5, 2013): 99. http://dx.doi.org/10.15174/rv.v0i12.6.
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En este ensayo se analiza el sustrato literario bíblico de Beloved(1987), de Toni Morrison, que desde el diseño paratextual permiterealizar nuevas interpretaciones históricas y contemporáneassobre el lugar del pueblo afroamericano dentro de la cultura estadounidense. Mediante una lectura detallada y hermenéutica de la novela, el tratamiento literario de la esclavitud en Estados Unidos se resignifica, poniendo énfasis en las crisis éticas que conllevan reposicionamientos comunitarios.
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Atu, Rusul Abdel Kareem, Abbas Lutfi Hussein, and Nadia Majeed Hussein. "Stylistic analysis of sarcasm in some selected extracts of schoolteacher in Morrison’s beloved." Linguistics and Culture Review 6 (November 26, 2021): 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.21744/lingcure.v6ns2.1888.
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Sarcasm is a manipulative concept which can be utilized in different forms and different senses to express different intentions. Toni Morrison makes full use of linguistic and figurative tools to express her sarcastic events and situations. Thus, this paper investigates the stylistic use of sarcasm in some selected extracts of Schoolteacher in Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ , focusing on the purposes behind the use of sarcasm in this novel. Five extracts are selected to be stylistically analyzed in terms of Leech and Short’s (2007) model. The paper concludes that Morrison utilizes lexical, grammatical and figurative devices to depict the schoolteacher’s sarcastic views and events concerning slaving black people.
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Naeem, Tamsila, Zafar Iqbal Bhatti, and M. Asad Habib. "Traumatic Speech Acts in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." International Journal of English Linguistics 10, no. 1 (January 13, 2020): 414. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v10n1p414.
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This qualitative study aims to scrutinize the traumatic effects of rhetorical and political excitable speech acts in Toni Morrison’s most commended novel Beloved, which presents haunting situations of slavery in USA. The novel demonstrates that the white masters attempt to interpellate the minds of the black slaves in order to make them recognize that they are sub-human creatures. These interpellative forces consequence in life time enslavement of the victims, since they never come out of the traumatic effects of the verbal abuse, they were victimized with. The data are collected from Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, which presents haunting situations in which the black slaves after their freedom, evoke in their mind traumatic memories of their slavery. In order to examine the traumatic speech acts, relevant excerpts were taken through purposive sampling under the method of content analysis. The applied theoretical model is based on Judith Butler’s postulates about burning speech acts presented in her famous book, Excitable Speech. The analysis of the selected traumatic speech acts shows that the pricking state of the victims’ self and ego traumatize them even after they get freedom. They repeat the injurious speech acts and atrocities of the white masters to further aggravate the situations through traumatic speech acts.
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ROYNON, TESSA. "A New “Romen” Empire: Toni Morrison's Love and the Classics." Journal of American Studies 41, no. 1 (March 8, 2007): 31–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875806002738.
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An important but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's novels is their ambivalent relationship with classical tradition. Morrison was a classics minor while at Howard University, and her deployment of the cultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her radical project. Indeed, the works' revisionary classicism extends far beyond the scope of established criticism, which has largely confined itself to the engagement with Greek tragedy in Beloved, with the Demeter/Kore myth in The Bluest Eye and with allusions to Oedipus and Odysseus in Song of Solomon.1 Morrison repeatedly subverts the central role that Greece and Rome have played in American self-definition and historiography. In Paradise, for example, the affinity between the Oven in Ruby and the Greek koine hestia or communal hearth critiques the historical Founding Fathers' insistence on their new nation's analogical relationship with the ancient republics. And in their densely allusive rewritings of slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath, Beloved and Jazz expose the dependence of the “Old South” on classical pastoral tradition. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in her most recent novel – Love (2003) – Morrison further develops the transformative engagement with America's Graeco-Roman inheritance that characterizes all of her previous fiction.2
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Paquet-Deyris, Anne-Marie. "Scènes d'esprit : Beloved [Jonathan Demme, 1998 ; Toni Morrison, 1987]." Revue Française d Etudes Américaines 101, no. 3 (2004): 96. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/rfea.101.0096.
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Silva, Jéssica Amanda de Souza. "Trauma, memória e identidade em Beloved, de Toni Morrison." Revista Letras Raras 9, no. 2 (June 14, 2020): 94. http://dx.doi.org/10.35572/rlr.v9i2.1767.
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Resultado de estudos doutorais, este artigo, de natureza bibliográfica, interpretativa e qualitativa, analisa a presença e a configuração da memória – seja individual, seja coletiva – bem como a representação dos traumas e dos processos de perda e (re)encontro de identidade de ex-escravos afro-americanos e seus descendentes, retratados no romance Beloved (1987), de autoria da premiada romancista afro-americana Toni Morrison. A análise, ora proposta, debruça-se sobre o estudo das vozes das personagens, especialmente as principais, procedendo a uma associação dos referidos elementos – memória e identidade – às narrativas, de cunho testemunhal, que ligam o passado e o presente dessas personagens, bem como aos traumas vividos e relatados por elas, na sua busca por liberdade e autonomia, durante o período da Reconstrução; contexto do pós-Guerra Civil Americana. Para tanto, a nossa análise ancora-se em Estudos Culturais e Pós-Coloniais da Literatura, a exemplo de Caze (2015), Nickel (2009), Ribeiro (2017), Silva & Umbach (2013) e Viana (2008). Destaca-se, como principal resultado, a importância do lugar de fala na rememoração e reconto do passado, sobretudo da escravidão, para a melhor compreensão dos traumas e fatos históricos, bem como da própria humanidade.
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Yadav, Ankur. "Pulling It Together: Human Resilience and Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 9, no. 8 (August 28, 2021): 69–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v9i8.11151.
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Toni Morrison’s Beloved is the story of the sufferings of Afro-American’s slavery, trauma of being forced to leave their homelands, horrors of parting with their relatives and the resilience of the Black Community to restore peace and harmony among themselves. The present paper demonstrates the extent to which individuals need the support of their communities in order to survive and how the community as a whole rises resiliently to overcome the trauma and pacify the sufferings of individuals. Morrison in this novel, benevolently asserts the need of community, its solidarity and its interdependence in offering resistance and kindling the spirit of resilience for the individual redemption by knitting a diverse and fragmented narrative only to be exorcised for a better future.
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Wyatt, Jean. "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108, no. 3 (May 1993): 474–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/462616.
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In Beloved, Toni Morrison expresses the dislocations and violence of slavery through disruptions in language. The novel tells the “unspeakable” story of Sethe, a slave mother whose act of infanticide leaves a gap in family narrative; bars her surviving daughter, Denver, from language use; and hinders her own ability to speak. Morrison's inclusion of voices previously left out of historical and literary narratives disturbs the language of the novel itself. The Africans piled on the slave ships, the preverbal child who comes back in the shape of the ghost Beloved, and a nursing mother who insists on the primacy of bodily connection: the expression of these subjects' heretofore unspoken experiences and desires distorts discursive structures, especially the demarcations that support normative language. Morrison's textual practice challenges Lacan's assumptions about language and language users, and her depiction of a social order that performs some of the functions of mothering challenges his vision of a paternal symbolic order based on a repudiation of maternal connection. (JW)
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Thohiriyah, Thohiriyah. "Solidifying the White Domination through Racism and Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." Language Circle: Journal of Language and Literature 14, no. 1 (October 16, 2019): 89–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.15294/lc.v14i1.21323.
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Beloved is a novel written by American author, Toni Morrison. Through Beloved, Toni Morrison successfully depicts a heartbreaking phenomenon of slavery that happened in the USA in 1873. Morrison describes the phenomenon of dominance-submission interrelation patterns in a master-slave relationship. By using the concept of racism and slavery, the paper aims at scrutinizing how the whites perform racism and slavery to solidify their domination over the blacks. Besides, it is aimed at investigating the impacts of slavery and racism done by the whites which are experienced by the slaves. Library research and close-reading methods are employed to analyze the novel. Besides, the qualitative and contextual method which focuses on intrinsic and extrinsic elements is utilized. The result of the analysis shows that racism and slavery are major elements that solidify whites’ domination over black slaves. In other respect, racism and slavery lead to great negative impacts for the black slaves. Excessive trauma and identity loss are the major impacts experienced by the slaves as the consequence of slavery and racism.
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Coser, Stelamaris. "African Diasporic Connections in the Americas: Toni Morrison in Brazil." Feminismo/s, no. 40 (July 15, 2022): 53. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/fem.2022.40.03.
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Admired throughout the world, Toni Morrison’s powerful voice resounds in special ways in Brazil, where she conducted part of her research for Beloved –a novel she considered an interrogation about the legacy of slavery in countries like Brazil and the USA. Initially labeled «politically correct» by Brazilian media, her works have finally achieved great visibility in the twenty-first century thanks to translations, a wide readership and increasing academic attention. In fact, Afro-Brazilian women writers, literary critics, historians, and cultural workers have reached unprecedented recognition in recent decades, along with a belated embrace of Morrison and other Black authors. This essay relies on Black feminist, diasporic and decolonial thinking to investigate how Morrison’s writing connects with the ongoing process of racial awareness and empowerment in Brazil, as well as with the writer Conceição Evaristo.
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Baggio, SM, and P. Chitra. "The Impact of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: From the Communal to the Individual." Shanlax International Journal of English 9, S1-i2-Dec (December 22, 2020): 5–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.34293/english.v9is1-i2-dec.3679.
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Slavery is a state of extraordinary physical, scholarly, passionate, and otherworldly hardship, a sort of terrible life. This paper targets investigating how the way of life of white bigotry endorsed official frameworks of separation as well as a perplexing code of discourse, conduct, and social practices intended to make racial domination genuine as well as normal and inescapable. In her magnum opus, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison depicts the dehumanizing impacts of subjection on the past and memory of her courageous woman. Morrison has committed her scholarly profession to guaranteeing that dark experience under, and because of, subjection would not be left to understandings exclusively at the directs of whites. This investigation shows how Toni Morrison has prevailing with regards to uncovering the physical and mental harm perpetrated on African American individuals by the ruthless brutality that comprised American subjugation. The paper, in this specific circumstance, researches how the memory and the past of the courageous woman go about as destroyers of her protective presence.
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Mohammed, Mahameed. "The Impact of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: From the Communal to the Individual." International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 7, no. 6 (November 1, 2018): 48. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.6p.48.
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Slavery is a condition of extreme physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual deprivation, a kind of hellish life. This paper aims at exploring how the culture of white racism sanctioned not only official systems of discrimination but a complex code of speech, behavior, and social practices designed to make white supremacy not only legitimate but natural and inevitable. In her masterpiece, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison portrays the dehumanizing effects of slavery on the past and memory of her heroine. Morrison has dedicated her literary career to ensuring that black experience under, and as a result of, slavery would not be left to interpretations solely at the dictates of whites. This study shows how Toni Morrison has succeeded in revealing the physical and psychological damage inflicted on African American people by the brutal inhumanity that constituted American slavery. The paper, in this context, investigates how the memory and the past of the heroine act as destroyers of her motherly existence.
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Kuzmanović, Denis. "FEAR OF THE PAST IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED – A NEW HISTORICISM PERSPECTIVE." Mostariensia 26, no. 2 (February 3, 2023): 63–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.47960/2831-0322.2022.2.26.63.
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Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is one of the most prominent recent depictions of the still unhealed wound of slavery which is deeply imbedded into the fabric of American society. Through the literary critical theory of New Historicism, this novel, a fictional piece of literature, can be considered a historical document in its own right, in which the author, although dealing with the 19th century Reconstruction period of the antebellum Civil War, presents, both consciously and subconsciously, her own contemporary notions of this period of America’s past. In other words, this novel has inner voices which desire to express a certain political, historical and social stance, both in accordance with the author’s wishes, but also “independently” so, as the author cannot help but be influenced, in various ways, by the contemporary views on this topic. Thus, Beloved becomes a document of its time, namely the 1980s United States, and represents sometimes conflicting voices regarding the factual and fictional past of the slavery period in question, but also of the present in which it was created. Keywords: Morrison; Beloved; Slavery; Civil War; Reconstruction; New Historicism
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Dr N, Raja. "Cultural Subalternity Subsumes Gender Review of Beloved by Toni Morrison." IARJSET 8, no. 6 (June 30, 2021): 383–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.17148/iarjset.2021.8666.
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Berger, James. "Ghosts of Liberalism: Morrison's Beloved and the Moynihan Report." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 111, no. 3 (May 1996): 408–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/463165.
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In focusing the novel Beloved on Sethe's forced infanticide, Toni Morrison places social and familial trauma at the center of American discourses on race. This emphasis opposes two forms of the denial of trauma that have characterized American politics since the late 1960s—neoconservative denial of the continuing effects of institutional racism and the New Left and black-nationalist denial of violence within African American communities. Beloved invokes an essentially liberal position of the sort that culminated and largely ended in the Moynihan report of 1965. But Morrison corrects the errors of this form of liberalism by insisting on the agency and autonomy of African American culture and on the positive roles of women.
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Lu, Yuehua, and Ziyu Zhang. "On Sethe’s Trauma and Recovery in Beloved from the Perspective of Trauma Theory." International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 8, no. 1 (2023): 194–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.81.23.
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This article is devoted to the study of trauma portrayed in the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison. The subject of the study is Sethe, the protagonists in the novel, who not only suffers from physical pain but also has to bear great mental pressure. The aim of the research is to find out the root causes and the recovery process of Sethe’s trauma, and then explore Toni Morrison’s writing ideas and the black spirit in her works. The major research methods are text analysis and social and historical criticism. How to heal the historical trauma that has been deposited in the hearts of the black people for such a long time and get rid of the misunderstanding of themselves? This is not only the question that the author has pondered over for a long time, but also a thought-provoking question to all the readers.
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Thurman, Deborah. "Sula’s Compromise: Toni Morrison and the Editorial Politics of Sensitivity." MELUS 46, no. 2 (May 6, 2021): 1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab016.
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Abstract An accomplished editor in her own right, Toni Morrison made no secret of her dissatisfaction with the editing of Sula (1973), whose opening pages she critiqued as a regrettable concession to white publishers and white readers. Yet despite Morrison’s prominence in recent studies of African American book history, scholars have yet to fully explore how the contested revisions to Sula impact the novel and what they reveal about racially motivated editing practices in mainstream US publishing. This article situates Sula’s publication history as an exemplary archive of editorial conflict, one that illuminates shifting editorial approaches to race in American fiction amid the rise of US multiculturalism. Tracing Morrison’s responses to editorial disputes about Sula and Beloved (1987), this article argues that her career indexes the emergence of racial sensitivity as an editorial concern in contemporary publishing, anticipating contemporary conflicts over formal sensitivity editing as a specialized mode of manuscript review.
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Midžić, Simona. "Responses to Toni Morrison's oeuvre in Slovenia." Acta Neophilologica 36, no. 1-2 (December 1, 2003): 49–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.36.1-2.49-61.
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Toni Morrison, the first African American female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is certainly one of the modern artists whose novels have entered the world's modern literary canon. She is one of the most read novelists in the United States, where all of her novels have been bestsellers. However, only Song of Solomon and Beloved have so far been translated into Slovene. There have been several articles or essays written on Toni Morrison but most of them are simply translations of English articles; the only exception is a study by Jerneja Petrič. This paper presents the Slovene translation of Song ofSolomon by Jože Stabej and the articles written on Toni Morrison by Slovene critics. Jože Stabej is so far the only Slovene translator who has translated Toni Morrison. The author of this article uses some Slovene translations from the novel in comparison to the original to show the main differences appearing because of different grammatical structures of both languages and differences in the two cultures. The articles by Slovene critics are primarily resumes or translations of English originals and have been mainly published in magazines specializing in literature.
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Koh, TaeJin, and Saera Kwak. "Community and Communitarianism in Toni Morrison: Restoring the Self and Relating with the Other." Societies 11, no. 2 (June 6, 2021): 57. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/soc11020057.
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Toni Morrison discusses the rebirth of the entire Black race through self-recovery. However, her novels are not limited to the identity of Black women and people but are linked to a wider community. Morrison might have tried to imagine a community in which Black identity can be socially constituted. In this paper, we discuss the concept of community by examining communitarianism, which is the basis of justice and human rights. Although community is an ambiguous notion in the context of communitarianism, communitarians criticize the abstract conceptualization of human rights by liberal individualists, but also see that human rights are universally applicable to a community as a shared conception of social good. Communitarianism emphasizes the role and importance of community in personal life, self-formation, and identity. Morrison highlights the importance of self-worth within the boundary of community, reclaiming the development of Black identity. In the Nancian sense, a community is not a work of art to be produced. It is communicated through sharing the finitude of others—that is, “relation” itself is the fundamental structure of existence. In this regard, considering Toni Morrison’s novels alongside communitarianism and Nancy’s analysis of community may enable us to obtain a sense of the complex aspects of self and community. For Morrison, community may be the need for harmony and combination, acknowledging the differences and diversity of each other, not the opposition between the self and the other, the center and periphery, men and women. This societal communitarianism is the theme covered in this paper, which deals with the problem of identity loss in Morrison’s representative novels Sula and Beloved and examines how Black individuals and community are formed. Therefore, this study aims to examine a more complex understanding of community, in which the self and relations with others can be formed, in the context of Toni Morrison’s works.
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Mehra, Dr Anju. "Troubled and Traumatized Self: A Psychoanalytical Study of Toni Morrison’s Beloved." Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT) 12, no. 3 (April 11, 2021): 3298–300. http://dx.doi.org/10.17762/turcomat.v12i3.1580.
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An attempt has been made in the present paper to study and analyse the troubled and traumatized self of Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A psychoanalytic thinker says “trauma places the relation between external reality and psychic reality in focus. A person’s personal experiences are represented in one’s own psyche and gets personalised. The internal world of wishes, conflicts and deficits, resulting from trauma, is negotiated in human interaction”. Here, Sethe felt affected both by physical and emotional trauma caused by the institution of slavery.The institution of slavery not only repressed the maternal bond betweenSethe and her children but alsoher own individualization and the development of her consciousness as a normal human being. Here, an attempt has also been made to explore how much she was affected by the repression of the memories of the trauma she had endured in her life and how much she was victimized and traumatized that she felt unable to nurture her own child Beloved. Under the oppressive conditions of slavery she found herself unable to form a maternal bond between herself and her beloved daughter. Morrison also tried to restore the historical record of the atrocities on the blacks during the period of slavery and give voice to the collective memory of Afro-Americans by depicting the trauma faced by Sethe
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Morris Johnson, Nicole. "On Opacity: Toni Morrison’s and Paule Marshall’s Narrative Vision Therapy." MELUS 46, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 116–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac010.
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Abstract Acknowledging an ongoing atmosphere of Black death, assault, and pain, and its relationship to a kind of ocular and imaginative distress, this article highlights the urgency of revisiting the lessons embedded in the writing of Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye [1970]), Beloved [1987]) and Paule Marshall (“Reena” [1962], and Praisesong for the Widow [1983]). I join robust conversations in Black and literary studies in examining Marshall’s and Morrison’s crucial lessons on healing Black vision—work necessary for full command of the imagination. These lessons become more pronounced when viewed through the lens of Marshall’s and Morrison’s literary “dark sousveillance,” which Simone Browne defines as the charting of possibilities and coordination of “modes of responding to, challenging, and confronting a surveillance that [is] all encompassing.” I argue that through the use of narrative vision therapy, or the use of narrative as a healing device that realigns readers with their power to imagine and craft narratives that decenter anti-Blackness, Morrison and Marshall demonstrate that imagining otherwise futures requires intentional returns to and ongoing vigilance from opaque spaces—wherein the embrace of Black flesh, sounds, movement, and memory can help reverse distortions that our hyper-seeing of various violent forms of anti-Blackness have wrought.
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Vayo, Brendon K. "‘Made the absence shout’: paradox as iconoclasm in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." Journal of Literary Semantics 51, no. 1 (April 1, 2022): 19–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jls-2022-2048.
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Abstract In 1856, Margaret Garner murdered one child, and attempted to murder three others, rather than return them to slavery. Despite the impact traumas like Garner’s had on abolition, history largely forgets or ignores these gruesome details. In their place come racialist markers that obscure Garner’s likeness. Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s The Modern Medea, for example, depicts Garner with a head wrap and wild eyes. Visual cues such as these perpetuate an undifferentiating representation of Garner, categorized as something between asexual “mammy” and angry “slave.” I argue that Toni Morrison recovers Garner by reconfiguring what Hayden White terms the “historical account” with icons to connote paradoxical significations. Like paradoxes, these icons simultaneously embody complementary and yet oppositional significations without one privileged over the other. Morrison’s historiography thus produces in simultaneity a history told and repealed, which functions iconoclastically not only to engravings such as The Modern Medea but also to the linguistic system that structures an incomplete and surreptitious “historical account.”
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Muhsen., Assist Instr Alaa Sadoon. "Search for Identity and Self-Realization in Toni Morrison'sBeloved." ALUSTATH JOURNAL FOR HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 214, no. 2 (November 11, 2018): 143–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.36473/ujhss.v214i2.638.
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This paper aims at exploring the search for identity and the ways in which Toni Morrison has systematically recast the image and reconstructed the identity of African American women in her novel Beloved. She employs different means such as pure black writing, love and myth by which she re-opens new doors for the African American women to achieve and reconstruct their identities in the community of slavery. Drawing upon womanist and postmodern theories of identity construction, and incommensurability, this paper argues that African American femininity is relationally constructed. In essence, black women's relationships with their children (especially their daughters), their men, and the White community of brutal slavery define who they are, determine how they perceive themselves, and, largely, dictate their capacity for success and survival.Though many scholars contend that Morrison's Beloved situates individual and collective memory as the vehicle by which such self-identification is achieved. It maintains that it is not until African American women and African American men are able to put their stories together and to identify new ways of seeing and relating to the other can they create any real sense of self-worth. Many scholars support this assessment as Morrison offers it through a reconstruction of personal and community histories and ancestral reclamation whereby the entire characters move on a continuum from a repressive slave perspective to an open, accepting, free perspective of self and environment. Therefore, (re)memory alone is not sufficient. There must be collaboration to weave the pieces, the fragments of the past into a tapestry that might provide warmth and security for the future.
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Prof. Sanjay Kumar Swarnkar and Shalini Shukla. "The Elements of Supernatural and Magic Realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." Creative Launcher 6, no. 3 (August 30, 2021): 40–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2021.6.3.08.
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The present research paper is a study of the elements of Magic Realism and the supernatural elements in the novel, Beloved by the Nobel laureate novelist Toni Morrison. The term Magic Realism was originally applied in the 1920s to the school of surrealist German painters and was later used to describe the process fiction of writers like George Luis Burges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie etc. These writers weave a sharply etched realism representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic and dream-like elements, as well as with material derived from myth and fairy tales. The German critic Franz Roz introduced the concept of Magic realism in 1920 and it was first used in paintings. The term was introduced in the book Post-expressionism, Magic Realism: Problem of the Most Recent European Paintings in 1925. The purpose here is to analyze the elements of magic realism in the novel, Beloved. We can see supernatural elements in Sethe’s house that bring chaos by haunting everyone through its mysterious presence, and making Sethe’s both the sons Howard and Buglar run away. It appears to be the ghost of a baby which was murdered by Sethe. The ghost causes the things in the house to break and shake mysteriously. In magic realism fiction the ghosts are the central characters generally. In the novel Beloved Morrison has portrayed the ghost as a living person. Thus, the dominance of a unique, mystical and gloomy atmosphere can be seen throughout the novel.
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Ahmad, Mumtaz, Asim Aqeel, and Sahar Javaid. "Re-Inscription of Black History/Body in Morrison's Beloved and Paradise." Global Regional Review V, no. IV (December 30, 2020): 128–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/grr.2020(v-iv).13.
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This article contends how Toni Morrison has used her black fiction to reject the dominant conceptions of reality and truth constructed by the white pahllogocentric discourses that tended to perpetuate white power interests. The poststructuralist assumption that knowledge and reality are socially constructed phenomenon provides useful insight into Morrison's narrative strategies and helps understand how, on one hand, she represents the ways the history of the black Africans had been badly disfigured in the white discourse resulting in the construction of the negative stereotypes of the black people as barbarians, savages, and uncivilized people whose mythical history and social values were invalidated as inauthentic and savage that needed the enlightening intervention of the white Europeans and, on the other hand, apart from revealing the discursive facts that control reality formation, she disrupts and displaces dominant and oppressive white knowledges.
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Awajan, Nasaybah. "Giving a Voice to the Oppressed in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Toni Morrison’s Beloved." World Journal of English Language 13, no. 2 (January 13, 2023): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v13n2p1.
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The current study intends to show the link between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The study tries to explore the way Lucky, who is introduced as a slave in Beckett’s play, represents Morrison’s Sethe. The study also intends to show how both Becket and Morrison are advocates for the oppressed and give them voices to speak up for themselves. To reach the aims of the study, both literary works are approached from the lens of postmodernism, especially focusing on postwar issues and how postmodern writers began looking back to colonial literature and started giving voices to the oppressed, where the approach of postcolonialism occurs. Most of the conducted studies tackle each literary work alone from the postmodern lens. What makes the current study different is how it links the two literary works together, yet also highlights how each author gives a voice to the oppressed.
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Borges, Anderson. "“Escovar a história a contrapelo”: uma reflexão sobre história e literatura em Beloved, de Toni Morrison." Em Tese 17, no. 2 (August 31, 2011): 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/1982-0739.17.2.26-36.
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Neste texto reflito sobre a releitura ficcional de eventos ocorridos nos<br />Estados Unidos presente em Beloved, de Toni Morrison, considerando a<br />fecunda relação entre memória e imaginação, que, de certo modo, qual a<br />figura do materialista histórico benjaminiano apresentado no texto “Sobre o<br />conceito de história”, revela a história dos oprimidos.
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Gras, Delphine. "Revisiting the Past in the Age of Posts: Rememory in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child and Gisèle Pineau’s Femmes des Antilles." Contemporary Women's Writing 13, no. 3 (November 2019): 270–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa010.
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Abstract In this article, I examine how Toni Morrison and Gisèle Pineau provide timely pieces against the historical amnesia characteristic of post-racial discourse in the USA and in France. Studying Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) and Pineau’s Femmes des Antilles: Traces et Voix (1998) side by side reveals how Morrison’s rememory is a global concept as pertinent today as when first coined in Beloved (1987). The term’s original use in the context of slavery also suggests a lens through which to read Morrison’s non-slavery era works like God Help the Child. What ultimately comes to the fore in both authors’ potent expositions of the specter of slavery haunting black women in the USA, France, and the West Indies is a rejection of historical silencing.
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Fatmasari, Yuniar. "Regulasi Peran Maternal Perempuan Studi Analisis atas Novel Beloved Karya Toni Morrison." BUANA GENDER : Jurnal Studi Gender dan Anak 1, no. 1 (June 28, 2016): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.22515/bg.v1i1.70.
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AbstractBasically, the body of the black woman slaves have experienced an immensely oppression whether from the economic, politic, and ideological dimensions; nevertheless, it is the ideological strategy which is believed in contributing the biggest and furthest effect so that the oppression still exists even the slavery has been abolished. During the slavery, the black woman slaves are forced to give birth as many as possible for the profit of the master. This shows that there is a control over the womb of the black woman slave. One of the strategies that the writer wants to convey in this article is the regulation on the maternal role of the black woman slaver. The individual maternal role is considered as a good strategy to conquer the body of the black woman slave so that they and the post-slavery black women are placing a disadvantage position in the social structure. Racism, sexism, class, and gender issues are assumed as the causal factors of this kind of social inequity.Keywords: individual maternal role, communal maternal roleAbstrakPada dasarnya, tubuh budak perempuan kulit hitam telah mengalami opresi secara besar-besaran baik dari dimensi ekonomi, politik dan ideologi; namun demikian, strategi ideologi-lah yang dipercaya memberikan efek paling besar dan dalam sehingga opresi tetap ada bahkan meski perbudakan itu sendiri telah ditiadakan. Selama perbudakan,budak perempuan kulit hitam dipaksa melahirkan anak sebanyak mungkin untuk kepentingan profit sang majikan dan hal tersebut menunjukkan adanya kontrol terhadap rahim budak perempuan kulit hitam. Salah satu strategi yang penulis ingin kemukakan di dalam artikel ini adalah regulasi terhadap peran maternal budak perempuan kulit hitam. Peran maternal individu dianggap strategis untuk menguasai tubuh perempuan kulit hitam sehingga budak perempuan kulit hitam dan perempuan kulit hitam pasca perbudakan menempati posisi yang tidak menguntungkan di dalam struktur sosial.Wacana rasisme, seksisme, kelas dan gender diasumsikan menjadi faktor penyebab ketimpangan sosial semacam ini.Kata kunci: peran maternal individu, peran maternal komunal
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Jones, Carolyn M. "Sula and Beloved: Images of Cain in the Novels of Toni Morrison." African American Review 27, no. 4 (1993): 615. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3041897.
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Khatir, Hadjer, and Eman Mukattash. "Toni Morrison and Susan Abulhawa Writing Female Characters Amidst Conflict and Warzones: Towards a Literary Matrilineal Lineage." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 12, no. 7 (July 4, 2022): 1349–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1207.14.
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The present article examines cases of sexual violence that are projected from wars and conflicts on women in Morrison’s Beloved (1997) and Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015). As we intend to study the violence projected on some female characters and trace the connection between Morrison’s Sethe and Ella and Abulhawa’s Nazmiyeh and Nur in light of Gilbert and Gubar’s theory “The Anxiety of Authorship” (2000), we endeavour as well to trace the connection between Morrison and Abulhawa’s treatment of “high themes” such as sexual harassment which, in return, helps ascertain their “artful foliage” as Gilbert and Gubar argue and overcome the hierarchical literary tradition of their forefathers to establish a literary matriarchal tradition that is inclusive of ethnic diversity.
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Castanheira, Beatriz. "A MORTE COMO QUASE ACONTECIMENTO EM TONI MORRISON." Revista de Estudos de Cultura 7, no. 18 (July 5, 2021): 173–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.32748/revec.v7i18.15992.
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Este trabalho pretende analisar o livro Amada, no original Beloved (1987), de Toni Morrison, traduzido no Brasil por José Rubens Siqueira. Desde sua publicação,recorrentemente tem sido posta em destaque a pertinência histórica do livro. Ao pautar-se em referências histórico-culturais, a narrativa em questão convoca o leitor a vivenciar uma experiência de contato com a morte. Buscar-se-á analisar tal experiência levando-se em conta que os sentidos de um morrer em Amada não adquirem sua maior força na lembrança de fatos históricos cruciais articulados pela narrativa, mas com a potência inventiva de um quase ser: um tipo de ser incorpóreo construído a partir de uma experiência de quase morte. Além disso, objetiva-se apresentar aqui uma aproximação desse quase-morrer em Amada à noção de morte como quase acontecimento, forjada por Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, comprovando que, no romance em questão, o mundo dos mortos se deixa compreender como uma imbricação entre vida e imaginação, e pode ser lido em diálogo com práticas interligadas da cultura ameríndia.Palavras-chave: Quase acontecimento. Perspectivismo. Imaginação artística.
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Alliot, Bénédicte. "Images de l'Amérique noire dans Beloved de Toni Morrison : la représentation en question." Revue Française d Etudes Américaines 89, no. 3 (2001): 86. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/rfea.089.0086.
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KOCABIYIK, Orkun. "The Concepts of Memory, Forgetting and the Past in Toni Morrison s Beloved." Mediterranean Journal of Humanities 6, no. 2 (December 29, 2016): 343. http://dx.doi.org/10.13114/mjh.2016.302.
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Cutter, Martha J. "When Black Lives Really Do Matter: Subverting Medical Racism through African-Diasporic Healing Rituals in Toni Morrison’s Fiction." MELUS 46, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 208–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac001.
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Abstract Toni Morrison spent much of her career detailing the unpredictability of African American existence within a racist society, with a special focus on patriarchal violence and medical apartheid against women’s bodies. Yet Morrison also limns out alternative modes of healing within a Black metacultural framework that moves between Nigeria, Brazil, and Egypt. As we move forward from the COVID-19 crisis, research has suggested that training more African American doctors, nurses, and physician assistants might curtail medical racism. Morrison’s fiction looks to a more basic level in which love of the bodies of African American people is at the center of healing. This article therefore discusses medical racism and applies Morrison’s lessons to the COVID-19 moment that her writing trenchantly foreshadows. It focuses on three healers who elide the medical establishment to embody a metacultural ethics of healing: Baby Suggs (in Beloved [1987]), Consolata Sosa (in Paradise [1997]), and Ethel Fordham (in Home [2012]). Morrison fuses an African-diasporic framework with embodied new knowledge that allows individuals to gain insight and agency in a white-dominant medical world that still refuses to endorse the idea that Black people’s bodies and psyches really do matter. An examination of these healers’ practices therefore sheds light on the COVID-19 moment by suggesting ways that African American people can stay “woke” and have agency when encountering and navigating traditional health care systems, which even today view the bodies of African Americans as fodder for medical experiments, immune to disease, and not in need of ethical and humane medical care.
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Sy, Ousseynou. "Toni Morrison’s transgressive literary preaching and folk songs as postmemory." International journal of linguistics, literature and culture 7, no. 4 (May 17, 2021): 241–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.21744/ijllc.v7n4.1720.
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This paper intends to study the sermons or ‘‘literary preaching’’ and folk songs in Toni Morrison’s fiction in the light of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. Drawing on Hirsch’s postmemory then, this paper articulates that the ‘‘literary preaching’’ and folk songs function within Morrison’s novelistic discourse as postmemory medium that presses against the erasure and the death of a culture and history. The folk songs and ‘‘literary preaching’’ are mediums of transgenerational transmission of trauma and history. Hirsch defines postmemory as the memories that the survivors of trauma bequeathed to their children and grandchildren. Hirsch presents photographs as the instrument through which postmemory is archived and conveyed. She talks about ‘‘photographic archive’’ since photographs can bring back their referents. In comparison, the sermons and folk songs are analyzed as ‘‘oral/aural archive’’, for they have the attribute of triggering memory and postmemory. Also, through her literary preaching, Morrison deconstructs and questions mainstream Christianity by blending it with unorthodox Christian practices. For example, Baby Suggs’ sermon in Beloved gives precedence to the flesh over the spirit, and this sermon is remembered throughout the text as a subdued metaphor.
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Tally, Justine. "The Gnosis of Toni Morrison: Morrison’s Conversation with Herman Melville, with a Nod to Umberto Eco." Contemporary Women's Writing 13, no. 3 (November 2019): 357–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa011.
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Abstract Long before Toni Morrison was extensively recognized as a serious contender in the “Global Market of Intellectuals,” she was obviously reading and absorbing challenging critical work that was considered “provocative and controversial” by the keepers of the US academic community at the time. While no one disputes the influence of Elaine Pagels’ work on Gnosticism at the University of Princeton, particularly its importance for Jazz and Paradise, the second and third novels of the Morrison trilogy, Gnosticism in Beloved has not been so carefully considered. Yet this keen interest in Gnosticism coupled with the author’s systematic study of authors from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance inevitably led her to deal with the fascination of Renaissance authors with Egypt (where the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were rediscovered), its ancient civilization, and its mythology. The extensive analysis of a leading French literary critic of Herman Melville, Prof. Viola Sachs, becomes the inspiration for a startlingly different reading of Morrison’s seminal novel, one that positions this author in a direct dialogue with the premises of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also drawing on the importance of Gnosticism for Umberto Eco’s 1980 international best-seller, The Name of the Rose.