Morrison’s complex writing is a quest to be taken by enthusiastic reader. For Morrison, to have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book is what is important. And, McKenzie argues that they are those ideologically structured spaces in Morrison’s 7 novels that draw readers into politics of space and race.

1. z
Spaces for readers:
the novels of Toni
Morrison
The Cambridge Companion to the African
American Novel

2. z
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL
 "Embedded in the term is a history of achievement and a cultural
heritage that raises as many questions as it answers. These
questions – most often about aesthetics and ideology as
conflicting and compatible tendencies in the novel – have given
African American authors a place of primary importance in
contemporary critical discourse" (Graham 1).
Presenter’s note: Cambridge companion to African American novel involves 17 different chapter, each focusing on different issues
of African American literature and tradition. With 17 different contributors, the edition is a long-breath survey of African American
literary history and criticism. History, aesthetic, form, politics, and etc., are major subjects discussed in the edition. As being the
focus of my presentation, Marilyn Mobley McKenzie’s “Spaces for readers: the novels of Toni Morrison” will be presented in this
presentation. The essayist is an associate professor in English from George Manson University.

3. z
Spaces for readers: the novels of Toni
Morrison
 The Bluest Eye (1970)
 Sule (1973)
 Song of Solomon (1977)
 Tar Baby (1981)
 Beloved (1987)
 Jazz (1992)
 Paradise (1998)
Presenter’s note: In Toni Morrison 7 novels, McKenzie analyzes
cultural and political dynamics of spaces. McKenzie argues that in
Morrison’s novels, domestic places represent refuge becoming
secure places where black protagonists are isolated from outside
world. Being economically, culturally and politically effected and
dominated by state and white community, public spaces are
problematical for black characters.

4. z
Construction of Meaning
by hermeneutics
 "... the Nobel Laureate ... has also commented on the role of the reader in the construction of
meaning" (McKenzi 221).
Presenter’s note: Morrison’s complex writing is a quest to be taken by enthusiastic reader. For Morrison, to have the reader work with the author
in the construction of the book is what is important. And, McKenzie argues that they are those ideologically structured spaces in Morrison’s 7
novels that draw readers into politics of space and race.

5. z
The Bluest Eye (1970)
 Racial difference affects the social dynamics of the community.
 An exploration of being marginalized, not only in the earliest textbooks used
in elementary schools, but also in everyday lives both in and outside school.
 Due to the controversial topics the book raises such as racism, incest, and
child molestation, there have been numerous attempts to ban it from
schools and libraries (TIME Staff).
Presenter’s note: Racial difference affects the social dynamics of the community.​The novel can be read as an exploration of being
marginalized, not only in the earliest textbooks used in elementary schools, but also in everyday lives both in and outside school.
Due to the controversial topics the book raises such as racism, incest, and child molestation, there have been numerous attempts
to ban it from schools and libraries

6. z
The Bluest Eye (1970)
 Economic depravity, Taboos of rape and incest and Racism
 Morrison deftly creates an intimacy between the narrator and the
reader that she then disrupts with the plural pronouns, “we” and
“our.”
Presenter’s note: In Bluest Eye, we see domestic spaces as places where economic depravity dictates when and how
people love, where taboos of rape and incest traumatize black girlhood, where racism in the larger world shapes mind
sets of people how to imagine themselves. McKenzie points out that Morrison’s repeatedly use of plural pronouns
suggest that it is not only community but also reader that may be implicated.

7. z
Sula (1973)
 It "illustrates how space gets racialized and shapes our
understanding of our identity and the options available to us"
(McKenzie 224).
 "[t]hey were mightily preoccupied with earthly things" (Morrison 5)
Presenter’s note: In Sula, we see how urban phenomena is changing public and private spaces. But, more importantly, McKenzi
points out that Morrison creates two different spaces at once for her readers. On one hand, the readers get a window into how
black people in Medallion were leading their lives; on the other hand, readers learn those lives are much more complex to be
understood with one perspective because those characters are also individuals. Thus, we see how Morrison creates spaces for
her readers to consider simultaneously how race does and does not matter for the stories she needs to tell.

8. z
Song of Solomon (1977)
 It "moves literally and metaphorically in and out of space and time. ... Morrison constructs several spaces for the reader to come into a narrative of African and
African American history and culture" (McKenzie 225).
 Renaming hostile spaces such as Doctor Street to Not Doctor Street and Mercy Hospital to No Mercy Hospital
Presenter’s note: With the folktale of flying Africans and the history of one family’s connection to that folktale at the center of the novel, Morrison
deftly weaves multiple stories into one grand narrative; moving in and out of the past and present, the author illustrates that a mature sense of
identity requires an understanding of the interdependence of both. In song of Solomon, Morrison firstly tells the hostile spaces to which black
people had become accustomed, and she then shows how they subverted the power of racist practices through the linguistic practices like
renaming hostile spaces such as Doctor Street to Not Doctor Street and Mercy Hospital to No Mercy Hospital to document how they had been
excluded. Morrison brings the reader into intimate contact with strange people and unfamiliar events to reveal the various ways black people
have survived oppressive spaces and unjust treatment through language, music, and cultural practices.

9. z
Tar Baby (1981)
 A contemporary setting in the Caribbean with a young black woman
with an almost postmodern sense of her racial identity.
 Dynamics of the familiar public and private in somewhere else other
than the United State.
Presenter’s note: Morrison again disrupts familiar ideas about race, class, identity, and culture to
provide some new ways of reading them. Morrison lifts cultural dynamics from the familiar public
and private spaces of her first three novels on the mainland of the United States and locates them
in the Caribbean to reveal how those dynamics might remain the same in a different space.

10. z
Beloved (1987)
 Excesses of love
 Interior spaces of thoughts and feelings
Presenter’s note: Beloved is about a formerly enslaved woman’s attempts to kill her children (she prefers them to be
dead to see them enslaved in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law; the novel is clearly about excesses of mother
love). Moving back and forth in time, narrating the novel through the aesthetics of memory rather than the chronology
of linear time, Morrioson makes her readers enter into the emotional past of slavery. The novel enables readers to
consider enslavement from a new perspective of how black people were able to endure, to survive, when they did not
own their bodies, their children, or anything but their own minds.

11. z
Jazz (1992)
 By using an aesthetic narrative style that mirrors the improvisation of jazz,
Morrison tells a travel from South to North.
Presenter’s note: Morrison takes the reader away from Harlem Renaissance and bring them into the private spaces of black folks who try to find a living after civil
war. They are lured into the City as a new, open space for their freedom to flourish. The novel explores through a very improvisational rendering of the multiple
readings of what happened, not only from the characters themselves, but even from the narrator.

12. z
Paradise (1998)
 "The excesses of religious love produce another kind of arrogance in Paradise"
(McKenzie 230).
Presenter’s note: The novel exposes the various ways in which this all-black paradise unravels
because of the ways in which their religious and gendered orthodoxies break down into violent
arguments about everything from the history of the town, to the meaning of the oven, its central
edifice, to the character of the women who seek refuge in the convent on the outskirts of town.
The familiar space of the church with all its sacred meanings gets deconstructed in this novel for
the ways in which it exposes the hypocrisies and secrets of domestic space

13. z
In Conclusion
 "Inside the space of her novels is a form of uneasy rest, therefore,
encouraging readers to return to their lives with new ways of making
meaning of them" (Mc Kenzie 231).
Presenter’s note: All of Morrison’s novels so far challenge the reader to move from familiar to
unfamiliar interpretations of life and living. She invites readers into the cultural politics of race,
gender, class, age, and even religion to entertain new readings of the text of their own lives, the
nation, and the global community.

14. z
Works Cited
 Graham, Maryemma. Cambridge companion to the African
American novel. Cambridge, UK New York, N.Y: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
 Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Bantam Books, 1973.
 TIME Staff. "Top 10 Book Controversies, The Bluest Eye". Time.
Retrieved November 24, 2012.