Modern Literature Commons^™

Taking Refuge In “How:” Dissecting The Motives Behind Cholly’S Rape In The Bluest Eye, Rebecca Andrews

Undergraduate Review

Most parents see parts of themselves in their children. They see their own familiar eyes, their sense of humor, and their long legs. Parents desire to nurture their child’s every hope and dream, and also want to raise their children in a safe and secure environment. However, what if a father saw in his daughter everything that he hated in himself? What if this same father never learned to love in a nurturing way from his own parents? The effects would be devastating. Toni Morrison examines such a scenario in her 1970 novel The Bluest Eye through the rape Pecola …

Solaris, America, Disneyworld And Cyberspace: Salman Rushdie's Fairy-Tale Utopianism In Fury, Justyna Deszcz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In this paper, I discuss the figure of professor Malik Solanka, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's latest novel, Fury (2001), and his attempts at constructing a fairy tale utopia as a means of establishing his identity. I try to elucidate this problem referring to the concepts of the fairy tale utopian as formulated by J. R. R. Tolkien, Ernst Bloch, and Jack Zipes, as their propositions can be regarded as the most effective exponents of the utopian imagination and seem very applicable to Rushdie's utopian attempts. On the basis of such a reading, I also reflect on the …

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …