Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye Lecture II

1
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye Lecture II

• Ramon Saldivar
• Stanford University

2
The Subjectification of the Subject

• Aesthetics and the social structure
• Literature and Society
• Black women writers in the 20th c. American
  literary tradition
• Quiet as its kept, there were no marigolds in
  the fall of 1941. BE

3
The codes and touchstones of the world, BE 47

• Foregrounding the trivial
• Backgrounding the shocking
• Capturing the grammar of the discourse of
  American subject creation
• But since why is difficult to handle, one must
  take refuge in how.

4
Dick and Jane

• White family primer
• The mythology of classic American life
• The deconstruction of the myth
• The ideology of beauty
• The social construction of beauty

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Dismembering white baby dolls Beauty
Politicized and Racialized

• disinterested violence . . . repulsive because
  it was disinterested. . . BE, 23
• Kants Critique of Aesthetic Judgement
• Whiteness and privilege
• Pedagogy of the movies
• Pedagogy of the oppressor

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The Blues-ness of Blue and the Law of the Heart

• Hating Shirley Temple
• disinterested violence BE, 23
• The best hiding place was love BE, 23

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Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

• The Ideology of the Aesthetic
• Beauty as an element of the Political Unconscious

8
Gender as the Modality of Race

• Beauty and the internalization of subjection
• Misogyny and race
• Love is never better than the lover, BE 206