ENG364Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Toni Morrison, Pecola, Ice Cream Cone
20th Centry Am li Lecture 9
January 26th 2017
Toni Morrison-The bluest eye
-educated in the english tradition she is now studied in
-she is a difficult writer, which usually doesn’t do well in terms of sales
-she is a rarity in that she’s a critics darling but also does well commercially
-even though she has very difficult subject matter, this does not keep her from topping
best seller lists
-she grabs us and captures our attention, but at the same time writes very difficult
novels—accessible difficulty
-a paradox
-Morrison’s motivation for writing: focusing on a little black girl, a demographic which has
never held centre stage
-internecine racism: destructive to both sides, creating conflict within a group
-why does Toni Morrison make the statement black isn’t always beautiful?
-she is arguing against statements made by many black male writers in the 60s
-she says that by saying this we are glossing over the history of racism
-the bluest eye is about how people, communities, and ideas are coded as ugly
-story takes place in 1941
-narrator is a small child in a large family
-she has an impulsive side, a mean streak
-the opening: what is the point of it?
-written in a childlike tone
-coming into literacy is equivalent to coming into a kind of racial consciousness
(or unconsciousness)—an indoctrination
-written in the tone of popular 1940s/50s primers on how to read which was
how children learned to read
-the people who created these books thought of them as sort of devoid of
content, blank, the most vacant meaningless ways to teach children
-but they are not vacant—they are encoding through an insidious means we’re
just teaching children how to read
-teaches children what to want
-the default
-by simply teaching children how to read they are encoding them into this
ideological sequence
-encoding them in a vision of normalcy
-education into literacy is an education into other sorts of assumptions
-the opening Dick and Jane story is repeated, each time becoming more
incomprehensible
-reveals just how inaccessible that narrative actually is
-the degeneration of language—just by taking away the surface levels of
convention, you end up with a kind of nightmarish incomprehensibility
-in comparison, Pecola’s family cannot help but seem abnormal
-it is through stories like this that Pecola learned to want blue eyes, to feel inferior to
white america
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Document Summary
Educated in the english tradition she is now studied in. She is a difficult writer, which usually doesn"t do well in terms of sales. She is a rarity in that she"s a critics darling but also does well commercially. Even though she has very difficult subject matter, this does not keep her from topping best seller lists. She grabs us and captures our attention, but at the same time writes very difficult novels accessible difficulty. Morrison"s motivation for writing: focusing on a little black girl, a demographic which has never held centre stage. Internecine racism: destructive to both sides, creating conflict within a group. Why does toni morrison make the statement (cid:1688)black isn"t always beautiful? (cid:1689) She is arguing against statements made by many black male writers in the 60s. She says that by saying this we are glossing over the history of racism. The bluest eye is about how people, communities, and ideas are coded as ugly.
