The Art Of Defamiliarization In Beloved

Toni Morrison (1931-) can be regarded as one of the leading writers in the world. Her famous novel Beloved, which was published in 1987, is always viewed as her representative work. In 1993, The Academy of Literature of Sweden gave her the Noble Prize for the description "in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import", which "gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". Toni Morrison, the author of the book, exhibits fully her spirit of anti-tradition in narration, language and theme and becomes an epoch-making literary master with her unique technique and style. Based on textual analysis, this thesis intends to explore how the effect of defamiliarization has been achieved in Toni Morrison's Beloved.Following a brief introduction to the research work is the main body of the thesis that consists of three chapters:Chapter 2 concentrates on the techniques of defamiliarization in narrative structure, narrative point of view and narrators in the novel. In Beloved, non-linear narration, limited point of view and abnormal narrators violate the limitations of the traditional paradigm for plot-development. The author's narration prolongs the reader's aesthetic experience, on the other hand, enhances the reader's aesthetic consciousness and inspires them to find out the relationships among those disconnected units.Chapter 3 introduces the defamiliarization in language. The language in Beloved is specialized in its perceptive metaphor and imagery, and graphological variation so as to give the whole language a strong infectious power.Chapter 4 probes into thematic defamiliarization on maternal love. Morrison's depiction of motherhood breaks the stereotype of the all-nurturing, caring, and devoted great mothers. Distorted maternal love breaks traditional thinking pattern and themes in literature, enhances the story's shocking power and increases Beloved's tension and expressive force.Based on the analysis of the above three chapters, this thesis concludes that Toni Morrison has managed to endow her novel with singularity and originality by adopting various techniques of defamiliarization such as rejecting traditional narration, innovating techniques of expression, and subverting habitual thinking and perception. All these techniques of defamiliarization strengthen the difficulty of understanding and prolong readers'perception. Interpretation of Beloved from the perspective of defamiliarization is ulteriorly instructive and significant for readers to understand Toni Morrison's great efforts to speak out the unspeakable past of the blacks.