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CONNER, MARC C., ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 150 pp. $18.00.
The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison brings together seven new essays and one reprint on the aesthetics at work in Morrison's novels and in her Nobel Prize speech. Morrison has explicitly worked to distance herself from Western (predominately white male) traditions in favor of situating her writings within an African-American cultural and aesthetic tradition. In response, perhaps, much of the scholarship on her work has focused on what editor Marc C. Conner terms the "political or ideological," thus limiting the lenses through which critics have read her work. This collection works against the trend by attempting "to remove certain cataracts that have clouded the vision of Morrison scholarship and to demonstrate how successfully traditional aesthetic concepts can engage her writing and its implications" (Conner xiii). The approach, then, is an admittedly contentious one, but those very contentions open up intriguing new readings of Morrison's novels and enrich the aesthetic traditions themselves, for Morrison revises and extends those traditions as she engages them. While the introduction might suggest that the volume ignores the intersections of aesthetics and politics, that is not the case. Rather the volume reveals the ways in which traditional aesthetics illuminate new and important elements in Morrison's work, including political and social ones.
Conner's introduction to the volume establishes the goal of the collection, which is "to expand the ways in which [Morrison's] novels are read" (xxvi). While the authors are certainly not the first to engage the subject of Morrison's use of Western aesthetics, Conner feels the need to justify the volume in the face of Morrison's attempts to distance herself from them. His summary of the ongoing debate over aesthetics versus politics in African-American literary studies since the Harlem Renaissance is helpful in establishing the goals of the volume and for providing an overview of the debate for those new to the discourse.
The opening essay of the volume, the one reprint, "'Aesthetic' and 'Rapport' in Toni Morrison's Sula" by Barbara Johnson in many ways works as an extended epigraph for the collection. Johnson uses Freud's aesthetic concept of the uncanny to establish the intersections of the aesthetic, social, and political...