INTERWEAVING OF ABSENCES AND PRESENCES IN TONI MORRISONS POSTMODERN PASTICHE TEXT BELOVED.docVIP

INTERWEAVING OF ABSENCES AND PRESENCES IN TONI MORRISONS POSTMODERN PASTICHE TEXT BELOVED 　　Beloved is one of Toni Morrison’s most popular and influential novels.This text could be interpreted from various perspectives.In this paper，the author intends to explore this novel as a postmodern text，and tries to tackle the interweaving absences and presences of the characters and events in the novel. 　　Beloved weaves a story on a singular frame：interpretation represents an integral part of black cultural and social identity.In Toni Morrison’s book，the fictional characters and communities—as objects of exploitation in both slave and free-market societies—transform an essential absence into a powerful presence.A sense of self emerges from experiences of exploitation，marginalization and denial.Analogously，Morrison’s narrative，confronting a facelessness the dominant culture in America threatens to impose on black expression，forges out of cultural and social absence of voice and identity.Beloved creates an aesthetic identity by playing against and through the cultural field of postmodernism. 　　At a very basic level，this engagement with postmodernism manifests itself in the aesthetic play of the novel.Throughout，Beloved demonstrates its concern with linguistic expression：the evocation of both oral and written discourses，the shifting from third person narration to omniscient narration to interior monologue，the iteration and reiteration of words and phrases and passages.While this linguistic and narrative variation is evocative of an oral literature that shapes and retraced various tellings of the same story，it also demonstrates a concern with the production and meaning of language.The text thus spins a story woven of myth that creates a pattern of sophisticated linguistic play.There is a crossing of genres and styles and narrative perspectives in Beloved that suggests it filters the absent or marginalized oral discourse of a pre-capitalist black community through the sel