Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Quotes

Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison Melanie R. Anderson The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville Copyright © 2013 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. First Edition. An earlier version of the section on Paradise in chapter three appeared as “‘What would be on the other side?’ Spectrality and Spirit Work in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” in African American Review 42.2 (Summer 2008). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson, Melanie. Spectrality in the novels of Toni Morrison / Melanie Anderson. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-57233-980-4 ISBN-10: 1-57233-980-2 1. Morrison, Toni—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ghosts in literature. 3. Future life in literature. I. Title. PS3563.O8749Z537 2013 813'.54—dc23 2012026773 For my parents—Paul and Deborah Anderson I think of ghosts and haunting as just being alert. If you are really alert, then you see the life that exists beyond the life that is on top. It’s not spooky, necessarily—might be, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s something I relish, rather than run from. Toni Morrison Interview on NPR, September 20, 2004 The latter [scholar] would finally be capable, beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non-life, of thinking the possibility of the specter, the specter as possibility. Jacques Derrida Specters of Marx ...