A discussion of a cluster of Toni Morrison's non-fiction pieces concerned with gender, memory, and the imagination. We explore the relation between Morrison's meditations and our previous conversations about place and memory, in particular how transcendence is brought to sites through memory-work and the imagination. As well, the ways in which memory-work and the imagination entwine with landscape, meaning, and the ethics of reading emerge as both conceptually interesting and innovative and as imperatives placed on us by Morrison's deep work on the meaning of literature and literary production. How does that deep work make us different kinds of readers? How does it animate literature and our imaginations when we engage the text?
What is Fashioning Critical Theory?
Podcasted conversation on critical and literary theory, drawing on a range of theorists from Europe, the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. Our title is drawn from Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," where she writes that poetry fashions a language where words do not yet exist. How does theory make words and world new, attuned, and embedded within inventive and inventing lived-experience, tradition, and cultural production?