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Syllabus The Pieces of Toni Morrison Fall 2020 Instructor’s information Instructor: Amanda Bennett What is this course about? This introductory course will familiarize students with five fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis—Oedipality, narcissism, masochism, mourning, and melancholy—through the literary and editorial work of Toni Morrison. Thinking through the often under-studied psychoanalytic registers of Morrison’s work will allow students to critically engage with the fraught and exploitative history that exists between Black Americans and the diagnosis of mental illness. The purpose of the course is not to superimpose European psychoanalytic models onto the Black familial constellations within Morrison’s novels. Rather, this course is interested in the chiastic relationship between Morrison’s narration of the interior lives of Black Americans and the terminology and analytic models of psychoanalysis. Our investigations of these five central concepts within Freudian psychoanalysis through the lens of Morrison’s narrative universe will allow us to collectively develop answers to questions such as: How must Freudian concepts be altered and historicized to interpret the psychic and social lives of Morrison’s Black American characters? How does the established narrative of Black American “culture” change when witnessed through the frame of psychoanalysis? How must the Freudian Oedipal model of desire and kinship change and become aware of its own historical and racial limitations when interpreted through Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Hortense Spillers’ “Isom,” “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight,” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”? How do the racial, legal, and gendered logics imposed upon Black Americans by chattel slavery (including partus sequitur ventrem) require the development of an analytic kinship model that is related to but not reducible to the Oedipal model? Why is there a dialectical or chiastic relationship between narcissism and masochism for Morrison’s character Sula and the rap persona of Megan thee Stallion? How does a combination of structural inequalities and interpersonal violences cultivate or discipline an insecure Black female ego which is both self-destructive and self-protective? How does the insecure ego delimit or overdetermine the kinds of political and intellectual movements that Black women develop in response to systemic racial and gender inequality? How do writers such as Morrison, Angela Davis, and Hortense Spillers use written narrative to document, grapple with, and overcome external limits placed on the ego? Why is the term “mourning” often inadequate when attempting to describe the responses of Morrison’s Black characters in novels such as Beloved and Sula to death and loss? How does a novel like Beloved demonstrate the inextricability of mourning from melancholia for Black Americans?
