Toni Morrison’s BelovedMaster ClassIn-Person

Toni Morrison's Beloved is beautiful and haunting, disturbing and grounding, raw and seamless, a literary site of memory and repair, and a contemporary culture wars battleground. In short, Beloved holds complexity, inviting us as readers, teachers, and students of the novel to grapple and question, empathize and wonder. How might we be effective audiences of this text and its concerns? We’ll discuss Beloved through primary documents that informed Morrison's writing of the novel. We'll delve into the novel's examination of the afterlife of slavery, highlighting how slavery's legacy continues to reverberate in our present. We’ll discuss how to frame conversations about the novel’s themes that feel particularly resonant, such as censorship, national memory and memorialization, questions of identity, belonging, and agency, and the traumatic legacy of slavery. Ultimately, we will engage Morrison's novel as a complex work of literature that offers virtual realities and spaces in which we can practice acting with historical awareness and empathy in our current world, so that we might cultivate repair and renewal beyond its pages.

ENGLISH