unit 6 the african-americans ---extensive reading 2.pptVIP

Unit 6 The African-Americans Toni?Morrison?and?Her?Novel?Beloved Toni morrison (Chloe Anthony) (1931---) , American novelist, born in?Lorian, Ohio, educated at Howard University, where she later taught, and at Cornell. She married?Howard Morrison, a Jamaican architect, but separated from him in 1964. Before becoming a professional writer she worked in publishing, as an editor for Random House. Her novels deal with the historical experiences of black Americans within a white social and cultural environment.?The Bluest Eye (1970) recounts a?year in the life of Pecola Breedlove, a?victim of rape by her father. Succeeding novels included Sula (1974), the story of two young black girls, one of whom leaves the small Ohio community of their birth and returns ten years later; Song of Solomon (1977) ; and Tar Baby (1981). Beloved (1987) was set in the 19th century and is the story of a runaway slave who kills her daughter rather than see her brought up to slavery. Her other work includes?Jazz (1992) and a study of the significance of African-Americans in American literature, Playing in the Dark: Witness and the Literary Imagination (1992). She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.? Beloved, a novel by Toni Morrison, set in 1873 in America. The narrative technique is deliberately non-linear and complex, the language richly poetic and suffused with biblical?references. Sethes, a former slave, lives with her daughter Denver and the ghost of her dead baby girl. The book opens with the unexpected arrival of Paul D., one of the five men with whom Sethe had formerly been enslaved at Sweet Home, a Kentucky farm. Paul D.?moves in, and as they face the past together, their tragic story unfolds. Meanwhile, an uncanny girl called Beloved is an incarnation?of the daughter Sethe had murdered, in a fit of hysteria, in order to prevent their being torn apart. In three sections of poetry, the meaning of Beloved is explored; the word transcends its character, and becom