The Study Of Violence And Its Aesthetic Representations In Toni Morrison's Home

Toni Morrison is a famous African American writer.She is also the only black female writer that has ever been granted the Nobel Prize Award for Literature.In 2012,Toni Morrison,in her eighties,brought another poetic work Home to readers.Since its publication,relevant critical works and compliments appear incontinuously.Such works study the novel from various perspectives,mainly including the return of home,deconstruction and construction of home,feminism,identity crisis and so on.They are of great significance for understanding the text deeply.This dissertation intends to exclusively concentrate on the violence appearing in Home.The novel is set in the 1950 s which is a seemingly peaceful era.Actually,it is thickly enveloped by numerous violent elements.It tells a traumatic story about the veteran Frank and his sister Cee.Their living experience is filled with such kinds of violent elements as war violence,sexual violence,domestic violence and racial violence.Violence is closely connected with our daily life and it always accompanies the development of history.This paper mainly focuses on the following aspects: various violence,violence representations and the meanings of representing violence.In chapter two,violence will be discussed from the following aspects,violence and war,violence and race,violence and home,violence and females.In terms of violence representation,there will be four kinds of methods to be introduced in chapter three: hallucination and dream,sensory passivation,non-continuous narration and visualized narration.Such representation methods borrow from violence aesthetics.They are different from other traditional ways,which endow the novel with special aesthetic values and also endow readers with distinctive reading experience.In the following chapter,there are three kinds of meanings concerned,textual meaning,social meaning and aesthetic meaning.Through this dissertation,we will have a further understanding of the novel Home on one hand.On the other hand,we can have a clear recognition of the social reality at that time.Lastly,we will have increasing recognition of violence,aesthetics and violence aesthetics.