Rewriting History: An Analysis Of Counter-Narrative In Toni Morrison's Home

As one of America‘s most venerated and celebrated literary figure,Toni Morrison(1931-)is the only living American and the only black woman ever to have received the Nobel Prize for literature(awarded in 1993)for ?in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,she gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Ever since her first novel,in the ensuring over forty years,committed her creative career to excavating and ?yielding up a kind of truth",Morrison has participated in what Michel Foucault called ?the insurrection of subjugated knowledges" by giving voice and force to African Americans whose stories have been long written off,silenced or idealized by official narrative of history.Though Morrison gains her first and later her best-known reputation as a talented novelist,it would be short-sighted to limit her achievement to be so.Morrison‘s literary achievement is closely linked with her appearance as an author of scores of critical essays.Aiming at entering her literary world in Home and truly understanding the genesis and essence of Morrison‘s creation of this novel,Morrison‘s own critical thoughts embodied in her social or literary criticism formulate the main theoretical framework of this thesis‘s close reading of the counter-narrative in Home.The main body of this thesis consists of three chapters: chapter one demonstrates some main points of Morrison‘s critical thoughts embodied in her social or literary criticism;Looking at the narrative form in Home,chapter two firstly analyzes how the conflicting fictional voices in Home reach out to readers in the real world and raises their awareness of the unreliability in the hegemonic official narrative.Then it discusses how Morrison in her character‘s confession questions and deconstructs the hegemony of US historical narrative;Chapter three focuses on the main contents of Home and looks at how Morrison‘s portray of the 1930s-50 s of the United States is rather different from how it is recorded by official narrative.Based on the above analysis,it concludes that in the fashion of a literary archeologist,Morrison took the veil away from the nineteen fifties bringing to the fore several historical knowledges misrepresented in the official narrative of the historical past.Like Frank in Home at the end of the novel,digging up and reburying the lynched old man,Morrison suggests that African Americans must dig underneath and rebury the traumatic past that misrepresented in the official narrative to move on with their lives.