outline_us_lit

Morrison has said that she was creatingher own sense of identity as awriter through this novel: “I wasPecola, Claudia, everybody.”Sula (1973) describes the strongfriendship of two women. Morrisonpaints African-American women asunique, fully individual charactersrather than as stereotypes.Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977)has won several awards. It follows ablack man, Milkman Dead, and hiscomplex relations with his familyand community. In Tar Baby (1981)Morrison deals with black andwhite relations. Beloved (1987) isthe wrenching story of a womanwho murders her children ratherthan allow them to live as slaves. Itemploys the dreamlike techniquesof magical realism in depicting amysterious figure, Beloved, whoreturns to live with the mother whohas slit her throat.Jazz (1992), set in 1920s Harlem,is a story of love and murder; inParadise (1998), males of the allblackOklahoma town of Ruby killneighbors from an all-women’s settlement.Morrison reveals thatexclusion, whether by sex or race,however appealing it may seem,leads ultimately not to paradise butto a hell of human devising.In her accessible nonfiction bookPlaying in the Dark: Whiteness andthe Literary Imagination (1992),Morrison discerns a defining currentof racial consciousness inAmerican literature. Morrison hassuggested that though her novelsare consummate works of art, theycontain political meanings: “I amMorrison’srichly wovenfiction has gainedher internationalacclaim. Incompelling,large-spiritednovels, she treatsthe complexidentities of blackpeople in auniversal manner.not interested in indulging myselfin some private exercise of myimagination...yes, the work must bepolitical.” In 1993, Morrison wonthe Nobel Prize for Literature.Alice Walker (1944- )Alice Walker, an African-American and the child of a sharecropperfamily in rural Georgia,graduated from Sarah LawrenceCollege, where one of her teacherswas the politically committedfemale poet Muriel Rukeyser.Other influences on her work havebeen Flannery O’Connor and ZoraNeale Hurston.A “womanist” writer, as Walkercalls herself, she has long beenassociated with feminism, presentingblack existence from the femaleperspective. Like Toni Morrison,Jamaica Kincaid, the late Toni CadeBambara, and other accomplishedcontemporary black novelists,Walker uses heightened, lyricalrealism to center on the dreamsand failures of accessible, crediblepeople. Her work underscores thequest for dignity in human life. Afine stylist, particularly in her epistolarydialect novel The ColorPurple, her work seeks to educate.In this she resembles the blackAmerican novelist Ishmael Reed,whose satires expose social problemsand racial issues.Walker’s The Color Purple is thestory of the love between two poorblack sisters that survives a separationover years, interwoven with thestory of how, during that same period,the shy, ugly, and uneducated115