The Historiographic Metafictionality of Toni Morrison's Trilogy (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 16, Sultan Moulay Sliman University, language: English, abstract: The aim of the following dissertation is to prove the postmodernity of Morrison's work. It is an attempt to underline the postmodern implications of Morrison's trilogy including "Beloved" (1987), "Jazz" (1992), and "Paradise" (1998). This is why; the following research finds it useful to rely on Linda Hutcheon's seminal work of "A Poetics of Postmodernism" (1988) as a guiding thread in the study of Morrison's trilogy. The originality of the following dissertation lies in the fact that Hutcheon's guiding theoretical work has come into being before the writing of Morrison's trilogy, precisely one year after the publication of Morrison's first novel of the trilogy that is Beloved. The present dissertation is an academic attack on the critics who exclude Morrison while discussing novels under the category of postmodern fiction. Morrison is usually approached from different theoretical frameworks, mainly black feminism, narratology, critical race theory, psychoanalysis and so on. However, the postmodern post-colonial Morrison has always been doomed to neglect. Hutcheon's notion of historiographic metafiction is an umbrella term that describes Morrison's postmodernity. The main aim of the dissertation is to simplify and thus breaks Hutcheon's theoretical work into three main chapters namely subjectivity, palimpsests and magic realism with their implication in Morrison's trilogy.

The dissertation is supposed to be made up of four chapters. However, for some academic reasons, it was necessary to omit the first chapter, which is dedicated to Morrison's use of metafiction. Therefore, the reader will find out that the dissertation rely heavily on the historiographic dimension of Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism while neglecting its self-reflexive aspect. Nevertheless, the reader can find some implications of metafiction in the introduction. At last but not least, the last chapter of magic realism is an attempt to supply the limitations of Hutcheon's seminal work on postmodern fiction by arguing that magic realism is part and parcel of Morrison's trilogy and thus of historiographic metafiction.