Toni Morrison

Forty Years in The Clearing

Carmen Gillespie

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781611484922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades.

Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama.

What distinguishes this bookfrom the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Forty Years and More in the Clearing Selected Morrison Chronology, 1970–2012
• INTRODUCTION Gather at the Clearing
• CHAPTER ONE In The Beginning: Two Reviews John Leonard’s New York Times 1970 Review of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker’s New York Times “Letter to the Editor” in Response to Sara Blackburn’s 1973 Review of Sula
• CHAPTER TWO In Search of the Clearing
• CHAPTER THREE Trouble in Paradise: Representing Bliss in Non-Orgiastic Language
• CHAPTER FOUR “Margaret’s Lullaby” (from Act I, Scene 2 of Margaret Garner)
• CHAPTER FIVE “Creatively Serving — The Process” An Interview with Playwright Lydia Diamond, Author of the Play The Bluest Eye
• CHAPTER SIX American Romance, the Moral Imagination and Toni Morrison: A Theory of Literary Aesthetics
• CHAPTER SEVEN Meditations on Love
• CHAPTER EIGHT And Everyone Will Answer
• CHAPTER NINE Morrison as Subject: The Photographs
• CHAPTER TEN Wrestling Till Dawn: On Becoming an Intellectual In the Age of Morrison
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Playing in the Wild: Toni Morrison’s Canon and the Wild Zone
• CHAPTER TWELVE “Looking Shakespeare in the Face:” An Interview with Toni Morrison’s Howard University Friends, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN Melancholy and the Unyielding Earth in The Bluest Eye
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN Co(n)ven(t): A Performance Study of Toni Morrison’s Paradise
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?: Food, Race, and [En]countering the Modern in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Testimony and Transformation: An Exploration of the Intersection of the Arts of Toni Morrison and the Potential Therapeutic Uses of Narrative
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Belief and Performance, Morrison and Me
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Praise Song for Toni Morrison
• CHAPTER NINETEEN Morrison and Obama
• CHAPTER TWENTY Body Difference in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Toni Morrison, Théodore Géricault, and Incendiary Art
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Morrison as Muse: The Poetic Process
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 15 Haiku (for Toni Morrison)
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Making of a Novelist (Epistolary)
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Beloved Bodies: Gestures toward Wholeness
• Bibliography Works by Toni Morrison Other Sources (cited in this volume) Secondary Sources