AML 4604-Summer 2025-Okonkwo

This course focuses on Toni Morrison (1931-2019). A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and the first African American writer, indeed the first black woman, to win the Nobel Prize for literature, among other honors, Morrison is a luminary and genius that needs little or no introduction to readers worldwide. In this course, we will study her first five novels, chronologically: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987). We will also examine her short story “Recitatif.” To help deepen our appreciation of Morrison’s world, politics, and art, we will place her canon in a nexus of contexts and traditions: African, African American, African American women, American, and Caribbean histories and literatures. Students are encouraged to visit the Toni Morrison Society webpage for biographical, programmatic, and archival information.