Love, by Toni Morrison

In Toni Morrison’s Love one central character is Heed Cosey, a decaying or decadent widow: an old black woman. Heed lives apparently out of time in an old mansion. From the beginning of the narrative, we have descriptions and characterizations of Heed which construct one ambiguous character.

The objective of this text is to provide evidence for the statement that through linguistic, textual and discursive strategies, Morrison constructs Heed Cosey as one ambiguous, and undefined character. The main theoretical concept that sustains this text is Stuart Hall’s statement that the “identidades culturais estão sendo deslocadas e fragmentadas na contemporaneidade” (2003). Another is Kristevas’s “subject in process” (1996: 351).

Heed Cosey will be understood as a post-modern subject, fragmented and “in process”. The subject, the character, will be investigated through strategies of representation: descriptions of her clothes, physical features (mainly body), statements about her, and others. Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s statement that “tudo está no material, principalmente no material verbal” (1995: 42).

The analysis will use a close reading of the relations between different characters and Heed. Through the concept of focalization, the work begins analyzing the different perspectives and representations of Heed, by the other characters and by herself. From beginning to end the different representations of one character are seen as supplementary readings, and each diverse representation of Heed gives us dissimilar ways of perceiving her, adding information, as well as physical & psychological characteristics. Actually, the narrative uses different perspectives to represent and reveal one object of analysis.

Morrison’s book, Love, constructed through explicit strategies of representation, provides a representation of the post-modern subject, fragmented and in process.

Vander Resende - Acadêmico de Letras UFSJ Profa. Dra. Madga Velloso Tolentino - DELAC – UFSJ (Orientadora) Profa. Kerry Reynolds (co-orientadora)
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VanRes. Vander Vieira de Resende (1974- ?)

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Neste blog publico os primeiros parágrafos, normalmente uma página, de textos de crítica literária e de estudos culturais, além de resumos e resenhas de textos teóricos. Se acessar meu blog http://vanres.blog.terra.com.br/ encontrará, também, algumas de meus poemas.