recitatif （宣叙）.pptVIP

Recitatif （宣叙） By Toni Morrison Recitatif is Toni Morrisons only published short story. It was first published in 1983 in Confirmations: An Anthology of African American Women Contents About the title The title alludes to a style of musical declamation that hovers between song and ordinary speech; it is used for dialogic(对话体的) and narrative interludes during operas and oratories. The term “recitatif” also once included the now-obsolete（过时的） meaning, “the tone or rhythm peculiar to any language.” Both of these definitions suggest the story‘s episodic（插曲般的）nature, how each of the storys five sections happens in a register that is different from the respective ordinary lives of its two central characters, Roberta and Twyla. The story is set over a period of more than 20 years, between the late 1950s and early 1980s. The story‘s vignettes（小插曲）bring together the rhythms of two lives for five, short moments, all of them narrated in Twylas own voice. The story is, then, in several ways, Twylas recitatif. Plot summary First encounter They turn out to be, in Maya Angelou‘s famous phrase, “more alike than unalike.” The eight-year-old girls were both “dumped” there. They become allies against the “big girls on the second floor” (who they call “gar-girls,” a name they get from mishearing the word “gargoyle”（怪兽状滴水嘴）), as well as against the home’s “real orphans,” the children whose parents have died. They share a fascination with Maggie, the old, sandy-colored（沙色的）woman “with legs like parentheses（圆括符） who works in the homes kitchen and who cant speak. Twyla and Roberta are reminded of their differences on the Sunday that each of their mothers comes to visit and attend church with them. Twyla‘s mother Mary is dressed inappropriately; Roberta’s mother, wearing an enormous cross on her even more enormous chest, refuses to shake Mary‘s hand. Twyla experiences twin humiliations（蒙耻）: her mother’s inappropriate behavior shames her, and she feels slighted