The best literary criticism offers ideas that go beyond the works or authors being studied. In my seminar this term on Toni Morrison's Middle Novels, we kept returning to two studies of Morrison. Timothy Aubry's "Why is Beloved So Universally Beloved? Uncovering Our Hidden Aesthetic Criteria" (2016) drew our attention to aesthetic issues we might have otherwise missed. And we took Martha J. Cutter's use of Tzetan Todorov's concept of the "fantastic" in "The Story Must Go on and on: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' and 'Jazz'" (2000) to see how Morrison's novels "hesitate" between the realistic and the supernatural – and between other conceptual pairs as well. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 June 2022)
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