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Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience. In foregrounding the ethics of fiction writing, the book resists any triumphalist reading of Morrison's achievement in order to allow the meditative, unsettled and unsettling questions that arise throughout her long labor at the nexus of language and politics, where her fiction interrogates representation itself. Moving between close reading and critical theory, Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics reveals the ways in which Morrison's primary engagement with language has been a search for how and what language is made to communicate, and for how and what speaks in and from generation to generation. There is no easy escape from such legacy, no escape into a pure language free of the burdens of racialized agendas. Rather, there is the example of Morrison's commitment to writerly, which is to say readerly, wakefulness. At a time when sustained study devoted to single authors has become rare, this book will be an invaluable resource for readers, scholars and teachers of Morrison's work.
Introduction -- From witnessing to death dealing: on speaking of and for the dead -- Burnt offerings: law and sacrifice -- Time out of joint: the temporal logic of Morrison's modernist apocalyptics -- Beginning and ending, part one: old languages/new bodies -- Beginnings and endings, part two: the poetics of similitude and disavowal at utopia's gates -- Epilogue.
Includes bibliographical references and index.