Emotional Story Structures

  If we are engaged in what happens to the fictional human beings in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, we will have emotional reactions to them: we will simulate their experiences.  But will we have empathy for them, feel affinity with them?  If we are non-African Americans, will we expand our understanding of and compassion for…

This blog invites you on a journey to find “blues people” in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise and follow the arcs of their blues-durative emotional story structures.  (see The Roots of Toni Morrison’s Durative Blues and Emotional Story Structures  for more on those concepts).  We will explore the following questions with each of the novels: 1.  By examining some possible blues-based…

Novels and stories worldwide share prototypical story structures or plots; for instance, Patrick Hogan identifies 3 “universal narrative prototypes”: Sacrifice, Heroism, and Romantic Love, each of which has many variants. Yet in order to comprehend prototypes in African American literature in general, and in Toni Morrison’s work in particular, we have to turn to the…

With subversive love as a primary concern in Toni Morrison’s Beloved trilogy, Morrison has set a stage, so to speak, upon which readers will encounter the intense, often fraught and frequently poignant, emotional episodes of characters in their narrative worlds.  And how readers respond to these will depend on so many elements: personal experiences and…

This is the expression used to describe Consolata’s visceral emotional response to seeing Deacon Morgan for the first time as he rode by her on his horse.  What are we to make of this sound signifying Connie’s initial response to the man with whom she would be having a love affair?

“Stories and works are largely incomprehensible without reference to the emotions systems.”    —Patrick Hogan, Affective Narratology: the Emotional Structure of Stories   Toni Morrison has stated that one of her primary goals as a writer is to work with language in such ways that it can “enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal…