Approaches To Teaching The Works Of Toni Morrison

Essays on teaching Morrison as novelist and public intellectual

Toni Morrison’s novels have been frequently taught and frequently honored, earning the Nobel Prize and other awards. They are also frequently challenged and banned, a fact that highlights their power. Centering Black people and their lives, Morrison’s writing pushes readers to reconsider their ideas about canonical American literature. It also rewards engagement with its structural and stylistic creativity and deep historical grounding.

This volume offers approaches to teaching Morrison that help students navigate the complexities of her works and find in them ways to make sense of the world. Encouraging instructors and students to reflect on their own racialized identities, essays also emphasize reading in community, whether as collaborative pedagogy, team teaching, or public humanities initiatives, reinforcing the fostering of mutual respect and a community of care.

This volume contains discussion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Home, God Help the Child, Jazz, Paradise, Song of Solomon, Sula, Tar Baby, and “Recitatif,” in addition to Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand, Auf der anderen Seite, and The Cut; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Tracks, Four Souls, and The Night Watchman; William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; Darryl A. Smith’s “The Pretended”; and Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo.