She has said she was born into a family of storytellers, and considers her father’s folktales and her mother’s singing as examples of the uniquely black language she absorbed as a child. Her grandparents were all originally from the South, and Morrison credits her family with giving her a rich foundation in the language and rhythms of African American culture. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, a small, racially mixed steel town. In a 1977 interview, she said that it “seemed to Black people’s grace has been what they do with language.” Morrison is unparalleled in her ability to capture that grace on the page.
Above all, Morrison is known for her rich, lyrical prose, which fuses the rhythms and imagery of African American speech and music with other literary influences to create a discourse of its own. She has received numerous honorary degrees, prizes, and awards, including the Nobel Prize in literature. Morrison is widely recognized as one of the most influential American writers, and her novels are taught in literature, history, women’s studies, and African American studies courses across the United States and around the world. In this comment from a 1992 interview, Toni Morrison gives one description of the complex range of issues she explores in her work. The search for love and identity runs through most everything I write.” “I’m interested in how men are educated, how women relate to each other, how we are able to love, how we balance political and personal forces, who survives in certain situations and who doesn’t and, specifically, how these and other universal issues relate to African Americans.
0 kommentar(er)
