Earticle

초록

영어

Just as the emergence of the novelist Toni Morrison in 1970 can be defined as a Badiouian “event” that breaks with what African-American literature had been before, so too can the fact that she continues to renew her last/latest fiction be seen as a literary event. Morrison published Love at age 72, A Mercy at age 77, and Home at age 81. In 2015, she published her eleventh novel God Help the Child at the age of 84. Fiction writing is a relentlessly time-consuming and brain-consuming job. But like other older writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and the late Doris Lessing, Morrison would not stop writing fiction simply because she has aged. To use some key terms from age studies, Morrison does not seem to accept “decline at midlife” as natural. Regarding the relationship between aging and creativity, we need to take a look at what is at issue in literary gerontology. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, much attention was paid to issues of diversity. At a consequence, “age,” along with the three major analytical categories of race, class, and gender, has similarly obtained minor status as a social classifying device and a determinant of subjectivities. Inspired by scholars of age studies such as Katheen Woodward and Margaret Gullette, this paper analyzes briefly the aged characters of Morrison’s later novels under the rubric of the literary gerontology. Then, focusing on the relationship between age and youth in God Help the Child, I examined the ways in which the novel’s elderly black female characters affect younger ones.

목차

I. Morrison as “Event” Maker
 II. Morrison and Age Studies
 III. Elderly Women’s Care and Concern: “God Help the Child”
 Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• Junyon Kim [ 김준년 | Hongik University ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813