The Pieces of Toni Morrison Syllabus

 The Pieces of Toni Morrison Fall 2020 

Instructor’s information 

Instructor: Amanda Bennett

Email: ab664@duke.edu

 

What is this course about? 

This introductory course will familiarize students with five fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis—Oedipality, narcissism, masochism, mourning, and melancholy—through the literary and editorial work of Toni Morrison.  Thinking through the often under-studied psychoanalytic registers of Morrison’s work will allow students to critically engage with the fraught and exploitative history that exists between Black Americans and the diagnosis of mental illness. The purpose of the course is not to superimpose European psychoanalytic models onto the Black familial constellations within Morrison’s novels. Rather, this course is interested in the chiastic relationship between Morrison’s narration of the interior lives of Black Americans and the terminology and analytic models of psychoanalysis. Our investigations of these five central concepts within Freudian psychoanalysis through the lens of Morrison’s narrative universe will allow us to collectively develop answers to questions such as: 

·      How must Freudian concepts be altered and historicized to interpret the psychic and social lives of Morrison’s Black American characters?

·      How does the established narrative of Black American “culture” change when witnessed through the frame of psychoanalysis?

·      How must the Freudian Oedipal model of desire and kinship change and become aware of its own historical and racial limitations when interpreted through Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Hortense Spillers’ “Isom,” “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight,” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”? How do the racial, legal, and gendered logics imposed upon Black Americans by chattel slavery (including partus sequitur ventrem) require the development of an analytic kinship model that is related to but not reducible to the Oedipal model?

·      Why is there a dialectical or chiastic relationship between narcissism and masochism for Morrison’s character Sula and the rap persona of Megan thee Stallion? How does a combination of structural inequalities and interpersonal violences cultivate or discipline an insecure Black female ego which is both self-destructive and self-protective? 

·      How does the insecure ego delimit or overdetermine the kinds of political and intellectual movements that Black women develop in response to systemic racial and gender inequality? How do writers such as Morrison, Angela Davis, and Hortense Spillers use written narrative to document, grapple with, and overcome external limits placed on the ego? 

·      Why is the term “mourning” often inadequate when attempting to describe the responses of Morrison’s Black characters in novels such as Beloved and Sula to death and loss? How does a novel like Beloved demonstrate the inextricability of mourning from melancholia for Black Americans?

The temporality of this course is intentionally nonlinear, as each unit loops back into itself to form an intricate series of concentric circles. Time, when filtered through the bodies of Morrison’s characters who are descendants of American chattel slavery, will be experienced as “circles and circles of sorrow,” a description Morrison uses to capture the shape of Nel’s mourning cry in Sula. 

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to identify the specific links between the (inter)personal and structural causes of psychological and intergenerational trauma for Black Americans as Morrison represents them in her novels. Students will leave the course with an introductory understanding of fundamental concepts in Freudian psychoanalysis that is not reducible to Freud himself or the historical and social context in which he lived. Students will be able to articulate the contours of what Morrison describes as an “Africanist presence” within European psychoanalysis specifically and the white canon of Western literature generally.

 

Books:

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Plume 1994 edition)

Sophocles, Antigone 

Toni Morrison, Sula 

Toni Morrison, Beloved 

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake

 

Articles/Essays/Short Stories:

Hortense Spillers, “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers”

Michele Wallace, “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity excerpted from Invisibility Blues

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” 

Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” 

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me”

James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind”

Alexa Cucopulos, Poesis and Death: Foucault's Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Part 1

 

 

Written Assignments: 

You will be required to write two papers for this course, in addition to a critical introduction to a text of your choice. You will also be required to perform a short play, song, visual content, or series of poems that you wrote with the members of your assigned group. Guidelines for each will be distributed separately. You will be required to revise your mid-term paper after receiving feedback from me and one or more of your peers.

 

Please double-space your written assignments and use a standard word processing program, unless you are submitting a creative project. Guidelines for creative projects will develop over the course of the semester. All formal written assignments must include page numbers as well as your name, the date, and a (fetching and provocative) title on the first page. Submit a digital copy of the assignment via Sakai on the assigned due date. If you are concerned that you will be unable to make an assignment deadline, let me know at least 48 hours in advance. That way, we can negotiate another due date and I can make sure that I submit your midterm and final grades by the university deadline (10/2).

 

Weekly Responses: Please post your responses to each week’s reading assignment in the Sakai discussion board by midnight each Tuesday before class. Your responses should run around 250 words. In your response, talk about ideas that interested you in the reading. Where did you detect specific psychoanalytic concepts in Morrison’s work? Were there ideas that you didn’t fully understand? Do the ideas expressed in the reading appear in different forms in the world around you? End each response with a question that you would be interested in discussing with the class. Feel free to respond to each other’s posts on Sakai—this space is designed to help you generate ideas about the week’s assignment before class. Feel free to be experimental in your writing—it is essential for you to become familiar with language as an artistic medium in order to complete the later assignments in this course. You may decide to publish some of your responses and critical introductions in our class ‘zine.

 

Zines/Public Scholarship:

This portion of the class will develop in relation to how we collectively come to understand language, psychoanalysis, and Toni Morrison’s work over the course of the semester. How do you wish to tell stories that were never meant to be told?

 

 

Unit 1: Oedipality 

“Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

 

Week 1      Question/Sakai Prompt: What are some of the differences and similarities                        between the “I” of “Lay Your Head On My Pillow” and the “I” of Morrison’s           Preface poem? What is the story’s understanding of the relationship between                           Venus’s family background and the larger history of Black women in                                America?

         8/19: Introductions/syllabus; why Morrison? Why psychoanalysis? Why you?                                  Discuss Toni Morrison’s poem Preface to The Black Book (1974)—who is “I”?                         Who is “you”? 

         8/21: Amanda Bennett, “Lay Your Head On My Pillow.” Submit response to                                  prompt via Sakai by   midnight on Thursday. 

 

Week 2      Question/Sakai Prompt: How is Morrison manipulating language and                              narrative to make a critique of internalized racism? Why does she begin with               and frequently return to the children’s story of Dick and Jane? How does the                 language of Dick and Jane's adventures influence Pecola's desire for                                 blue eyes?

 

8/26: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye— “Autumn,” “Winter;” Toni Morrison    interview, “Why I Wrote The Bluest Eye”

                   8/28: Continue The Bluest Eye—“Spring,” “Summer”

 

Week 3      Question/Sakai Prompt: What is happening in the conversation between                          Pecola and herself at the end of The Bluest Eye? Why are there experiences                           or words that Pecola cannot say, even within the privacy of her own mind?

                   9/2: Finish The Bluest Eye— Afterword (Plume 1994 edition); Sylvia Plath                             interview on confessional poetry: 

                   9/4: Hortense Spillers, “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In                    the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers;” Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”

                   Assignment: I would like for each of you to write a 1-2 page description of yourself from the perspective of another person, either someone you already know or a total stranger. Pay close attention to the context in which you choose to describe yourself. What will you describe yourself doing (sitting in class, being at a party, going on a date, playing a sport, performing on stage etc)? Why is this person looking at you? What is this person like? How does this person see themselves within their own inner monologue?

 

 

Week 4      Question/Sakai Prompt: What is the cause of Antigone’s alienation, isolation,                            and death? What is Antigone’s—or her society’s—tragic flaw?

                  9/9: Anne Carson, Antigonick;  “Antigone is You is Me” exhibit by Alexandra                         Grant

                  9/11: Anne Carson, Antigonick (continued); MC Schraefel, Talking With Antigone.                  Read the Abstract, Acknowledgments, Dedication, Preface, and Introduction. Also              read the short quote from the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective on the page                      before Chapter Two begins.

 

Unit 2: Narcissism and Masochism

“And if it's an illusion, I don't want to wake up. I'm gonna hang on to it. Because the alternative is an abyss, is just a hole, a darkness, a nothingness. Who wants that? You know? So that's what I think about control, and that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it”— SZA’s mother, Ctrl

 

Week 5:          Question/Sakai prompt: What are the relationships that emerge between speech, sexuality, desire, womanhood, Blackness, and femininity not only in Luce Irigaray’s  This Sex Which is Not One, but also in the Sex Wars skirmishes that I outline in in my critical introduction to Hortense Spillers’ “Interstices” and Andrea Dworkin’s  Intercourse? Can or should BDSM be used as a method of interrogating the gendered relationship between narcissism (structurally masculine) and masochism (structurally feminine)?

 

                        9/16: Critical introduction due. No Sakai post due today. Watch Howardena Pindell’s experimental film, Free, White, and 21. As you watch the film, consider genre. What distinguishes documentary from cinema? How can Pindell’s work help blur the racialized line between documentary and fiction? 

                             

                        

                   9/18: Submit response to Sakai prompt by midnight on Thursday. 

                   Amanda Bennett critical introduction on Irigaray; critical introduction on Sex Wars/BDSM; Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which is Not One”

 

Week 6: Question/Sakai Prompt: Write a 1-2 page narrative about a time you were a bystander an act of violence. Violence here can be physical, sexual, emotional, and/or on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, religion, etc. Write it either from the perspective of yourself as a bystander, or from the perspective of the victim. Be prepared to explain why you chose to write from one position rather than the other.

 

         9/23: Toni Morrison, Sula—“Foreword,” “Part One”

         9/25: Toni Morrison, Sula—“Part Two” 

 

Week 7:          Question/Sakai Prompt: How can we develop methods of reading Black women’s sexuality and identity beyond a binary of abjection and ecstasy? How do Sula, “Maureen,” and “WAP,” blur the boundaries between abjection and ecstasy? Why does trauma make pain feel pleasurable?

 

9/23: Amanda Bennett poems: “Sula,” “Nel.” Continue discussing Sula. At home, listen to “Maureen” by Sade.Listen to “WAP”  by Cardi B and Megan thee Stallion.

9/25: Finish discussing Sula. Assignment: Bring to class one song that reflects your interpretation of Sula. Here’s the playlist we made.

 

Week 8:          Question/Sakai Prompt: How can the way we write and offer feedback during workshops unsettle the codependent relationship between narcissism and masochism? How is the collective practice of workshopping another’s writing a form of consciousness-raising?

9/30: Small group peer workshop of midterm papers. We will discuss guidelines for workshop etiquette and the mechanics of giving constructive, compassionate feedback to those with whom you are in community. How can the way we write and offer feedback unsettle the codependent relationship between narcissism and masochism? You will be required to submit written feedback on your peers’    work.

 

10/2: Midterm paper due by the beginning of class. In class, we’ll watch selections from SZA’s album Ctrl, including “Supermodel,” Love Galore,” and “Drew Barrymore.” We will listen to her song “20 Something” as well. Before class, read these interviews with SZA in Spin and Rolling Stone. 

 

Unit 3: Mourning and Melancholia; Or, The Fire This Time

         “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” —Dinos Christianopoulos

 

Week 9: Question/Sakai Prompt: How does Baldwin understand the relationship between      Christianity and the   experiences of Black people in America? How does Morrison’s    eulogy for Baldwin change your understanding of what writing can do?                  

         10/7: James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind;”     James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues;”  Toni Morrison, “James Baldwin: His Voice      Remembered; Life in His Language;” Hortense Spillers, “James Baldwin’s America” 

         10/9: Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”          Watch at home and discuss in-class Spillers’ lecture, “Shades of Intimacy: Women in the Time of Revolution” on the specific relation between “flesh” and the rape of enslaved Black women.

         Assignment: Write a 1-2 (or more, if you have time) page narrative told from the perspective of the monstrous “female with the power to ‘name’” who appears at the end of Spillers’ essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” What would she call herself? What kind of language would she use? What kind of environment would this individual need to exist? How would she describe herself, others, and the world around her? What is her opinion of herself? What is her purpose? What does she spend her time doing? What are her friends and relationships like? What is her internal monologue? Try to answer as many of these questions as you can while weaving together this character’s universe.

 

 

Week 10: Question/Sakai Prompt: What do you think Morrison means when she writes in the Foreword to Beloved that “to render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way” (xix)? How might the definition of language that Morrison wishes to move past in the Foreword differ from the language that Sethe’s      mother and Nan use? Specifically, I want you to look at the scene at the end of   chapter 6 in which Sethe recalls her childhood memory of Nan telling her stories   about the abuse of Sethe's mother on the slave ship (page 74 in print version).

 

         10/14: Toni Morrison, Beloved, chapters 1-7; Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning.” Listen to this recording of her essay. Watch this clip from Marlon Riggs’ documentary, Ethnic Notions.

         10/16: Toni Morrison, Beloved, chapters 8-12

         Assignment: Write a 1-2 page description of one of these primary emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, and interest. The actual word that claims to describe the emotion shouldn't appear in your description. What do these words mean from your perspective? What do the emotions beneath these words feel like to you? What memories, beliefs, and narratives are conjured when you think of these words?

 

 

Week 11: Question/Sakai prompt: For this response, please focus on the chapters that begin   “I am Beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves” and “I am Beloved and she is mine. Sethe is the one that picked flowers...” How does Morrison use language in these chapters to “say things that are pictures”? Why is it important   to find ways to “say things that are pictures”? What is the difference between the language Morrison uses in these chapters and the language Morrison said needed to “get out of the way” in the Foreword?

         Additionally, please read the critical introductions and the NYT Morrison interview I uploaded to the Week 11 folder. Now that Morrison has moved language out of the way, how might we read Beloved as a text about self-sabotage and witnessing? What lessons can we take from her experimentation and exploration?

 

                   10/21: Continue Beloved, chapters 13-18. Here’s the Beloved playlist we made.

         

                   10/23: Finish Beloved, chapters 19-22 and Part III

                   Assignment: For Friday, I'd like you to submit a 1-2 page description (or more, if you'd like) of how you imagine a family should look, function, and feel. To describe this “family,” you'll have to move language out of the way. The point of this assignment is to give you the space to detach yourself from a false binary of “good” and “bad” families in order to imagine what you think a family would look like in which all members are respected, seen, heard, valued, and loved (and what do those words even mean in the context of your imagined family?). “Family” in this sense can be forged either through biological or chosen connections— it's your choice.


If you find it difficult to begin imagining this family structure, you might start by imagining what Spillers’ “monstrous woman” from “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” would need from her family. Now that Spillers’ “monstrous woman” has named herself, what kind of family does she need around her to help her live up to her new name?

 

 

Week 12: Question/Sakai Prompt: In her thesis, Poiesis and Death, Alexa Cucopulos writes that the “constant undoing and remaking of the self is an ongoing resistance to biopower, a power that constantly tracks and orders life” (Cucopulos 6). How does she demonstrate the possibility of resistance to biopower through the formatting of her thesis, her argument, her objects of study, and her particular interpretation of a “fragmented Foucault”? 

What roles might poetry and poiesis have in making and unmaking the self, especially once language has been moved “out of the way”? What conceptual and emotional links do you see between the ideas in Cucopulos’ thesis, the trio of poems I’ve shared with you, and other texts we’ve read earlier in the semester?

                   10/28: Alexa Cucopulos, Poiesis and Death: Foucault's Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Part 1. Read the Preface, the Introduction ("A note on poem-lives"), and Chapters I and II.

10/30: Alexa Cucopulos, Poesis and Death: Foucault's Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Part 1. Read Chapter III ("Poetics and mourning," "Poesis as keeping vigil," "Poetic reading and the gesture of mourning in Eve Sedgwick,") and the Conclusion. 

Poems: Amanda Bennett, “I See All the Girls Who Could Have Been You :: You Could Have Been All the Girls I See,” “A Ghost is an Irrational Number,” “Something Funny Happened on the Way to Mimesis.”

Video clip: Marlon Riggs, Black Is, Black Ain’t

 

Week 13: Question/Sakai Prompt: Think back to Morrison’s editorial work on The Black Book. How might you collectively make a ‘zine to describe your various experiences in this course? How would you tell our class’s story?

                   11/4: ‘Zine Day!! Discuss Heresies #12 “The Sex Issue.”

                   11/6: Another ‘Zine Day!! Bring in either an archival print ‘zine (like Heresies )                              or a contemporary digital ‘zine or manifesto. 

 

Week 14: Question/Sakai Prompt: What pieces of Toni Morrison will help you find your people? What does the fragment of Toni Morrison we have created together mean to you?

                   11/11: Presentations

                   11/13: Presentations, final thoughts.