The Harlem Renaissance. A Critical Study of "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Literature, University of Alexandria (Faculty of Arts (English Dept.)), course: African- American Literature, language: English, abstract: Toni Morrison belongs to the modern literary and artistic movement which reached its peak in the 1920s. She was affected by towering figures like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. She believed in the modernist slogan that says "The medium is the message," or "The form is the content," which means that how a message or theme is presented is as important as what the message or theme is.

Unlike earlier writers who wrote chronological narratives which in some ways reflected the conventions of history writing, modernists became interested in representing the way characters thought. They decided that people did not think in sequential, logical, or chronological ways but much more as a sort of free association of thought. This is what many modernist writers attempted to capture in their novels and they called it the stream of consciousness narration. Morrison was affected by this literary school to a great extent.