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276955

God Help the Child: Toni Morrison’s Healing Narrative

Article

Last updated: 04 Jan 2025

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Tags

اللغويات

Abstract

Toni Morrison dealt pervasively and sequentially with the traumatized experience of abused children in her fictional canon. Morrison, an Afro-American writer opted for the adoption of postmodern narrative techniques in order to overcome the quandary of being a black writer whose primary narratee belongs to the mainstream white American culture. This paper aims at investigating Morrison's schematic narrative technique in remembering, revealing and eventually healing the traumatic history of abused African American children in her last novel God Help the Child (2014). The paper hypothesizes that Morrison adopts a postmodernist authorial stance in the composition of God Help the Child depending mainly on the dialogical polyphonic consonance of the heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrative voices of the main and minor characters in this novel. Moreover, the hypothesis of the paper is based on the presumption that Morrison's narrative schema is traceable to the psychoanalytic theory that the course of psychological recovery of the traumatized victims of child abuse is preconditioned by rendering full catharsis of trauma by means of narration.

Keywords: Child abuse, Trauma, Postmodern narrative, polyphony, Judith Herman, Recovery, Magic Realism and chronotope.

DOI

10.21608/jfafu.2022.178286.1844

Keywords

child abuse, Trauma, Postmodern narrative, Polyphony, Judith Herman

Authors

First Name

أحمد

Last Name

الکحکى

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

قسم اللغة الانجليزية و آدابها بکلية الآداب جامعة دمياط

Email

aalkahky@yahoo.com

City

المحلة الکبرى

Orcid

-

Volume

15

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

29957

Issue Date

2023-01-01

Receive Date

2022-12-02

Publish Date

2023-01-01

Page Start

684

Page End

722

Print ISSN

2357-0709

Online ISSN

2735-3281

Link

https://jfafu.journals.ekb.eg/article_276955.html

Detail API

https://jfafu.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=276955

Order

17

Type

المقالة الأصلية

Type Code

970

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

مجلة کلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم

Publication Link

https://jfafu.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

God Help the Child: Toni Morrison’s Healing Narrative

Details

Type

Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023