Toni morrison nobel speech. Toni Morrison: Nobel Prize speech is key to understanding her work 2022-11-08
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Toni Morrison, the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, delivered a powerful and poignant speech upon accepting the honor in 1993. In her speech, Morrison reflects on the role of literature and storytelling in shaping our understanding of the world and our place in it.
One of the central themes of Morrison's speech is the idea that storytelling has the power to both reveal and conceal truth. Morrison notes that stories "reduce the distance between what is happening and what could be," allowing us to imagine new possibilities and ways of being. At the same time, she acknowledges that stories can also be used to obscure or distort the truth, particularly when they are used to justify or reinforce oppressive systems and ideologies.
Another key theme of Morrison's speech is the importance of diversity and inclusivity in literature. She argues that a truly representative and meaningful literary canon should include voices from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. By excluding certain voices or perspectives, we risk creating a narrow and incomplete understanding of the world and the human experience.
Finally, Morrison touches on the role of literature as a means of resistance and liberation. She asserts that literature has the power to challenge and subvert dominant narratives, and to give voice to those who have been marginalized or silenced. She also emphasizes the importance of literature as a way of creating connection and understanding between people of different backgrounds and experiences.
Overall, Morrison's Nobel speech highlights the profound impact of literature on our lives and the world around us. It serves as a call to action for writers and readers alike to embrace the power of storytelling to imagine, reveal, and create a more just and equitable world.
"The Nobel Lecture in Literature" by Toni Morrison
How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past? Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives. And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue? Nothing, no word follows her declarations of transfer. Suppose nothing was in their hands? But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? That may be the measure of our lives. Like statist language, censored and censoring. One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself.
That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Retrieved August 6, 2019. . A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. Retrieved April 29, 2017. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures.
The Nobel Lecture in Literature Metaphors and Similes
She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required -- lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space. She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required — lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded. It is in your hands.
Toni Morrison: Nobel Prize speech is key to understanding her work
But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. Retrieved August 7, 2019. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity.
Toni Morrison’s Most Powerful Speeches and Interviews
The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency — as an act with consequences. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Are you any good? Retrieved June 11, 2007. Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek -- it must be rejected, altered, and exposed. Without writing a single word about modern politics, the author expresses her negative attitude towards it. That may be the meaning of life.
Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all — if the bird is already dead. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. Retrieved May 1, 2017. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. For instance, in educational settings, many students were exposed to the Eurocentric Western learning which its depiction of Africa were not only biased, but racist as well.
Retrieved October 26, 2022. The New York Times. A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Critical Companion to Toni Morrison: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. Is there no context for our lives, no song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? Retrieved February 12, 2021. Writers have adopted these themes and have fit them into contemporary times.
