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Description:

Toni Morrison’s readers and critics typically focus more on the “what” than the “how” of her writing. In TONI MORRISON AND THE GEOPOETICS OF PLACE, RACE, AND BE/LONGING, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison’s expressed narrative intention of providing “spaces for the reader” to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work.

Mobley’s approach is as interdisciplinary, intersectional, nuanced, and complex as Morrison’s. She combines textual analysis with a study of Morrison’s cultural politics and narrative poetics and describes how Morrison engages with both history and the present political moment.

Informed by research in geocriticism, spatial literary studies, African American literary studies, and Black feminist studies at the intersection of poetics and cultural politics, Mobley identifies four narrative strategies that illuminate how Morrison creates such spaces in her fiction; what these spaces say about her understanding of place, race, and belonging; and how they constitute a way to read and re-read her work.

Marilyn Sanders Mobley is joining us on the Busboys stage to share about her research and analysis of Morrison’s works. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Mobley will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of TONI MORRISON AND THE GEOPOETICS OF PLACE, RACE, AND BE/LONGING will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed.

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Marilyn Sanders Mobley is Emerita Professor of English and African American Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative and a spiritual memoir, The Strawberry Room, and Other Places Where a Woman Finds Herself.