{"id":1942,"date":"2019-08-19T10:54:45","date_gmt":"2019-08-19T14:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=1942"},"modified":"2019-08-19T10:54:45","modified_gmt":"2019-08-19T14:54:45","slug":"monday-missive-august-19-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2019\/08\/19\/monday-missive-august-19-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Missive – August 19, 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Honoring Toni Morrison<\/strong>\u00a0— On the fifth of this month, the great American author Toni Morrison died in New York City at the age of eighty-eight.\u00a0 The English Department has just installed an exhibit honoring Morrison and her literary legacy.\u00a0 The exhibit includes copies of many of her books as well as photographs of Morrison at various stages in her long life.\u00a0 Numerous members of the English Department helped with the installation of the exhibit.\u00a0 Janaka Lewis, Paula Eckard, Bryn Chancellor and Jeffrey Leak all provided copies of Morrison’s books from their personal libraries.\u00a0 Monica Burke, Angie Williams, and I all worked on installing the Morrison exhibit.\u00a0 I encourage everyone to take a look at the exhibit, which is located in the main lobby area of the English Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the other ways in which members of our English Department honor Morrison is by conducting scholarship on Morrison’s writings.\u00a0 For the purposes of this Monday Missive, I mention four examples of professors who have conducted Morrison-related scholarship.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her monograph titled\u00a0Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith,<\/em>\u00a0Paula Eckard examines the portrayal of motherhood in three of Morrison’s novels:\u00a0\u00a0The Bluest Eye, Sula,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Beloved.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>As Paula points out in her monograph, “In these three novels, Morrison presents motherhood with compelling and brutal honesty.\u00a0 She juxtaposes silence and voice in each novel and uses the maternal body as a source of myth and metaphor to undergd the realities of female experience.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his monograph titled\u00a0Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature<\/em>, Jeffrey Leak examines the depiction of black masculinity in Morrison’s\u00a0Song of Solomon.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>As Jeffrey discusses in his monograph, “Morrison appreciates the rich lives of black men, but she reveals two tenuous strands of black male heterosexual identity formation:\u00a0 virulent differentiation from women and homophobia.”\u00a0 In his analysis of\u00a0Song of Solomon<\/em>, Jeffrey shows how these two strands play out in the experiences of the novel’s protagonist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Janaka Lewis participated in Language Matters: Toni Morrison NEH workshops and met Morrison there and at her curated exhibit “Foreigner’s Home” at the Louvre in Paris as part of the Toni Morrison Society.\u00a0 She notes the influence of Morrison on the field of Black women’s writing in her book\u00a0Freedom Narratives<\/em>and writes about\u00a0Sula<\/em>\u00a0in a forthcoming article in\u00a0South<\/em>\u00a0journal called “Building Worlds of Our Dreams.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Malin Pereira\u2019s scholarship for the past two decades has been devoted to contemporary black poetry, Toni Morrison\u2019s first six novels were the focus of her earliest work, published in four journal articles, an essay in a collection on women\u2019s revisions of Shakespeare, and a chapter in her first book, Embodying Beauty: Twentieth-Century American Women Writers’ Aesthetics.<\/em> In all of these publications, Malin writes, \u201cI was obsessed with how Morrison wrote back to canonical authors and dominant Western ideas about female identity, beauty and blackness, always seeking to decolonize the black mind.\u201d Malin has a yet-unfulfilled desire to write on Morrison\u2019s libretto for the opera Margaret Garner<\/em> and why it substantially differs from her novel Beloved<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the aforementioned examples illustrate, our English Department is a place where Morrison and her writings are taken seriously.\u00a0 Ever since Morrison burst on the literary scene in the late 1970s, members of our English Department have read, studied, and taught Morrison’s novels.\u00a0 In so doing, we honor Morrison and her lasting contributions to American literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kudos<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u2014 As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.\u00a0 Here is the latest news:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allison Hutchcraft<\/strong>\u00a0published five poems in the summer issue of\u00a0The Missouri Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upcoming Events and Deadlines<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 Here is information about upcoming events and deadlines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

August 20\u2014 First day of classes for the fall 2019 semester. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

August 23\u2014 The CLAS All Faculty Meeting will take place on Friday, August 23, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. in the SAC Salons A & B. The meeting will be preceded by a light breakfast beginning at 8:30 a.m.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

August 23\u2014 The first English Department meeting for the fall 2019 semester will take place on Friday, August 23, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Fretwell 290B (seminar room).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quirky Quiz Question<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 Toni Morrison co-wrote several children’s books with her son, including\u00a0The Big Box\u00a0<\/em>(1999)and\u00a0Please, Louise\u00a0<\/em>(2014).\u00a0 What is the name of her son?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week’s answer: Prince Edward Island<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte is named after Queen Sophia Charlotte, the wife of England’s King George III.\u00a0 The capital of Canada’s smallest province is also named after this same queen.\u00a0 What is the name of this Canadian province?\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Honoring Toni Morrison\u00a0— On the fifth of this month, the great American author Toni Morrison died in New York City at the age of eighty-eight.\u00a0 The English Department has just installed an exhibit honoring Morrison and her literary legacy.\u00a0 The exhibit includes copies of many of her books as well as photographs of Morrison at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-missive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1942"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1948,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942\/revisions\/1948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}