The Historiographic Metafictionality of Toni Morrisons Trilogy

Masters 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 Morrisons work. It is an attempt to underline the postmodern implications of Morrisons trilogy including "Beloved" (1987), "Jazz" (1992), and "Paradise" (1998). This is why; the following research finds it useful to rely on Linda Hutcheons seminal work of "A Poetics of Postmodernism" (1988) as a guiding thread in the study of Morrisons trilogy. The originality of the following dissertation lies in the fact that Hutcheons guiding theoretical work has come into being before the writing of Morrisons trilogy, precisely one year after the publication of Morrisons 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. Hutcheons notion of historiographic metafiction is an umbrella term that describes Morrisons postmodernity. The main aim of the dissertation is to simplify and thus breaks Hutcheons theoretical work into three main chapters namely subjectivity, palimpsests and magic realism with their implication in Morrisons 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 Morrisons use of metafiction. Therefore, the reader will find out that the dissertation rely heavily on the historiographic dimension of Hutcheons A Poetics of Postmodernism while neglecting its self-reflexive aspect. Nevertheless, the reader can find some implications of metafiction