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Narrative Strategies and Traumatic Experience in Toni Morrison's Trilogy
Müllerová, Magdalena ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
This thesis examines narrative strategies and the representation of trauma in Toni Morrison's trilogy consisting of Beloved, Jazz and Paradise. Morrison's novels illustrate the black experience in the US throughout history; the trilogy begins in the 1870's with Beloved and continues through 1920's in Jazz to 1970's in Paradise. The main focus of this thesis is the exploration of the narrative strategies in the connection to trauma in order to showcase how Morrison manipulates the narrative to draw attention to the unheard traumatic experiences of black people, and consequently criticises the racist master narrative. Beloved depicts the immediate impact of slavery, and the following two novels expose how the underlining traumatic effects of slavery are reproduced long after its abolishment. Selected theoretical approaches to narrative and trauma are introduced in the first chapter. Mieke Bal's approach to narrative, combined with Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s African- American literary theory described in The Signifying Monkey, provides the basis for the analysis of the use of voice, narrative structure, retroversion, and repetition in the trilogy. The postcolonial view of trauma, informed mostly by Judith L. Herman's Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Abuse to Political Terror, is...
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