BASC70035 - Beginning Rich Trilogy: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jazz

Course Description

In this summer of 2019, we will enter and steep in Toni Morrison’s laden novels Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992), the first two works of her trilogy arcing over one hundred years. Morrison hews wracking deed (Sethe’s escape from rape and slavery in Beloved, and her slaughtering her daughter to prevent the child’s being seized into slavery; in Jazz, the dislocation of Harlem’s pulsing vitality driving country arrivals Violet and Joe to jealousy, grief, madness, murder – and, perhaps paradoxically, to friendships and solace. And, indissolubly, Morrison simultaneously renders spiritual, psychological, emotional and social mystery and discovery – violence and healing – via community, and within individual souls.  In the following summer, we will engage and wonder at the trilogy’s culminating work Paradise, and other works.

In the Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, Justine Tally frames the trilogy thus:

…Beloved is set during the 1870’s in the rural area outside Cincinnati, Ohio, with flashbacks to plantations in Kentucky and (probably) Carolina, and a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, during slavery. The emphasis on the rural is exchanged for the urban beat of “the City” in the 1920’s in Jazz, while the flashbacks are centered on the Reconstruction Era of the 1870’s. Paradise moves the locus forward to the 1970’s to a small town setting in Ruby, but the memories that constantly surface concern the “Founding Fathers” of Haven in the 1870’s after the political failure of Reconstruction, and the second migration during the 1920’s to the “perfect” all-black town of Ruby in Oklahoma. The time frame thus set out spans one hundred years of black life in the United States, and the interrelated settings encompass black experience in the rural south, the urban North and the small-town (southern) Mid-West.  (Ch. 5)

Toni Morrison generates worlds – of earthly and riving history, of African cosmology, of interiority, deed and spirit. They will challenge and illumine for us.