Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Miscellaneous Yellow Wall Yellow Wall In 1993 Toni Morrison joined the illustrious ranks of the Nobel Prize for Literature laureates as the ninetieth recipient, twentieth English-language author, eighth American, eighth woman, third black, and first African-American 1. Her mid-century predecessor William Faulkner (1897-1962) had just received the award in 1950 when Morrison (b. 1931) began writing her Master of Arts thesis on his work.2 Aside from both being Nobel laureates, this unlikely pair has, at first glance, little in common: Morrison, the college-educated daughter of a black Ohio shipyard welder, a key figure in the publishing and academic world; Faulkner, Southern son of "aristocratic" background, autodidact, reclusive loner. Yet, in addition to undeniable similarities in their canons such as taboo-breaking themes, complex prose style combining the oral with the written, and polyphonic narrative techniques, for contemporary readers there is an exciting dialectic between the Morrison and Faulkner oeuvres which shows how, among other things, the Nobel Prize heritage exposes the wounds of a society haunted by racial difference and offers at least narrative possibilities for healing them. In a literary version of the African-American folk technique "call and response,"3 William Faulkner, generally recognized as the greatest American modernist author, interacts—through the reader as interface—with Toni Morrison, whose latest novel Jazz "edges literary experimentation into the 21st century."4 Morrison's winning of the Nobel Prize was greeted by encomiums in many circles. Most newspaper reports quoted with approbation the Academy's criteria of literary skill and political commitment: Morrison's novels are "finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation," written "with the lustre of poetry"; she "delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race." The author "gives life to an essential aspect of American reality" in her novels which are "characterized by visionary force and poetic import." 5 In a spontaneous reaction to the news of Morrison's triumph, the guru of African-American studies at Harvard University, Henry Gates, Jr., praised Morrison's literary achievement, comparing her to literary pioneers from three continents: Morrison is "a masterful craftsperson, which people tend to overlook. She is as great and as innovative as Faulkner and Garcia Marquez and Woolf." He also pointed to the particularity of her achievement as an African-American: "Just two centuries ago the African-American literary tradition was born in slave narratives. Now our greatest writer has won the Nobel Prize."6 No doubt Morrison was particularly pleased by the joy of the African-American women; in her acceptance speech she quotes a message on her answering machine from an artist friend: "My dear sister, the prize that is yours is also ours and could not have been placed in better hands."7 The literary critic Barbara Christian, one of the first academics to write seriously about Morrison's work in the 1970s, extols her "liberating sound": "How fortunate to have lived at a time when we can dwell in, and heal, through her language! [...] to the African-American women, Toni Morrison had long since won a Nobel Prize."8 Toni Morrison's selection as Nobel laureate did not, however, meet with universal acclaim. The surprised international reporters gathered in Stockholm on Oct 7, 1993--even those who later wrote positive commentaries—greeted the announcement of the winner with an embarrassing silence instead of the usual applause and flurry of questions to the Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sture Allén.9 Back in America, some black writers and intellectuals, who viewed TM as one of several black women writers (like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor) appropriated by the white literary and academic establishment, saw Morrison's selection as mere "political correctness," the choice of an acceptable minority author to salve the conscience of the dominant culture.10 Earlier negative assessments pointing to Morrison's supposed "trademark excesses" in violence, racist sentiment, and prose style arose anew.11 Some critics simply did not consider that Morrison deserved the rank of "world-class novelist" and regretted that finer novelists remained "unawarded."12 Indeed, in his detailed book commissioned by the Swedish Academy, Kjell Espmark documents the way the post-World War II choices for Nobel laureates tended to favor the universally recognized "experimenters" such as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett who had brought "vital renewal" to literature, but that by the 70s, "functional and pragmatic viewpoints" took on more importance.13 Now the prize was not meant to be mere decoration, but rather should prove useful, lending support to a developing author, a neglected literary genre, or an "insufficiently recognized linguistic or cultural sphere" (92) as part of the Academy's attempt to address the prize to "the literature of the whole world."14 Despite the risk involved in selecting younger writers, the Academy saw its investment in rising authors, frequently from marginal groups, as part of its attempt to broaden its horizons and influence. The selection of an African-American woman was thus not incidental, but to view Morrison's selection as "patroniz[ing] by race", a mere "gesture of Social Significance" shows deep ignorance of the merits of Morrison's oeuvre. 15 Bibliography: NONE Word Count: 826
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