A Study Of Toni Morrison Within The Multicultural Context

Complexity of literary creation and multiplicity of artistic styles in African American writer Toni Morrison’s works have been the focus of scholars abroad and at home. The present dissertation is intended for a holistic exploration of multicultural background as a new approach to study Morrison and her works which have been neglected in existing criticism. Based on narratology, new historicism and feminist and cultural criticism, the study forms an attempt to catch the depth and uniqueness of Morrison’s works by a close examination of formation of Morrison’s multicultural conception and its development.The dissertation is composed of three parts:introduction, the body and conclusion.The introductory part presents a literature review of a general survey and a detailed interpretation of the key term multiculturalism and the methodology to carry out the study and the structure of the whole dissertation.The main body contains four chapters.Chapter 1 probes into multicultural elements in Toni Morrison, concerning regional culture, black culture, white culture and popular culture. The different cultural elements have exerted great potential impacts on Morrison and her works in terms of subject matter, theme and art.Chapter 2 explores Morrison’s two-dimentional motivation as a novelist:the internal factors of divorce and self-loss and the external factors of Civil Rights Movements and feminist movements. The chapter also explores the landscape of black women’s culture, in which black women construct their subjectivity to rebel against patriarchic authority and repel the traditional roles of women by using their bodies, while Morrison employs the art of patchwork to deconstruct the ideal family of the whites and oral tradition of the blacks to reveal the features of black culture.Chapter 3 analyses Morrison’s cultural stance as an American implicit in rewriting the history of slavery and American Westward Movement--- to excavate the buried historical materials of blacks in Beloved reveals Morrison’s reconsideration and appropriation of American history and to parody the Westward Movement in Paradise shows Morrison’s reflections on the negative effects of exceptionalism in the founding myth and West myth on blacks.Chapter 4 focuses on Morrison’s thoughts of politics and aesthetics in African American literature. To fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole is the core of Morrison’s literary creation; while Morrison’s contribution to the expansion of American literary studies lies in her reflections on race matter in the study based on rereading literary canons.The conclusion gives a summary of Morrison’s reflections on the impacts of white culture on blacks, emphasizing that Morrison’s literary achievements are the interactions between her multicultural background and the American multicultural society and that a full and thorough understanding of Morrison and Morrison’s writings will be gained by combining the values of her literary thoughts with the uniqueness of her art.