This course will explore Toni Morrison's oeuvre in a holistic and fully engaged way to encompass her status in the American canon of letters, as an exemplary of the best of modernism and postmodernism, and as a contributor to World Literature. We will also tackle the question of whether it is possible to extract theoretical insights from Morrison's work as she interprets various areas of the Black experience. Some literary writers, such as Shakespeare, James Joyce, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are reputed to induce us to create entirely new theoretical models to interpret both them and the worlds they represent to us. We will draw on Toni Morrison to attempt what I am going to call the project of Reading for Justice, which is a way of interpreting literature in such a way as to illuminate our pathway to greater racial and social equality. This is an idea inspired from the events surrounding the killing of George Floyd, Breona Taylor, and various Black folk in the US due to police violence. The terms of this kind of proposed reading are still in flux, and one of our tasks during the course of the quarter will be to examine what might be entailed in this form of an explicitly engaged ethics of reading from such a perspective of social justice.This class will be held in Building AFRICAAM 80.
3-5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
This course will explore Toni Morrison's oeuvre in a holistic and fully engaged way to encompass her status in the American canon of letters, as an exemplary of the best of modernism and postmodernism, and as a contributor to World Literature. We will also tackle the question of whether it is possible to extract theoretical insights from Morrison's work as she interprets various areas of the Black experience. Some literary writers, such as Shakespeare, James Joyce, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are reputed to induce us to create entirely new theoretical models to interpret both them and the worlds they represent to us. We will draw on Toni Morrison to attempt what I am going to call the project of Reading for Justice, which is a way of interpreting literature in such a way as to illuminate our pathway to greater racial and social equality. This is an idea inspired from the events surrounding the killing of George Floyd, Breona Taylor, and various Black folk in the US due to police violence. The terms of this kind of proposed reading are still in flux, and one of our tasks during the course of the quarter will be to examine what might be entailed in this form of an explicitly engaged ethics of reading from such a perspective of social justice.This class will be held in Building 80.
Offered in Winter 2026 at Stanford University.