Every time I hear that Toni Morrison has published a new book I immediately make room/space to digest her words. Thus it was with The Origin of Others. At 118 pages and almost pocket size it is a short but mighty read. Morrison references her (and others) work to name the continued atrocities of racism and 'othering'. Beloved full text pdf Download beloved full text pdf or read online books in PDF, EPUB, Tuebl, and Mobi Format. Click Download or Read Online button to get beloved full text pdf book now. This site is like a library, Use search box in the widget to get ebook that you want. Toni Morrison: A Mother, A Stranger, 'A Mercy' In this reading, Morrison presents a pivotal episode from her novel, A Mercy.The book explores the repercussions of an enslaved mother's desperate. Strangers in Text, Image and Life Robert Bergman’s images in A Kind of Rapture are presented to readers in the same way that strangers are presented on a daily basis: without context. After reading Toni Morrison’s “Strangers,” the introduction to Bergman’s book, readers analyze Bergman’s photographs in an entirely different way.
Strangers reading response. Strangers Analysis In his article, Toni Morrison reflects on the psychological effects of human interaction by depicting scenes from his own life experiences.
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Preview — The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?
Drawing on her Norton Lect...more
Published September 18th 2017 by Harvard University Press
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I wish I was 1/8 as smart as Toni Morrison’s thumb.
Nov 13, 2017Janani rated it it was amazing
Shelves: north-american-authors, poc-author-artist-mc, essays, owned-books, social-justice, non-fiction, women-nb-gf-authors-protags, 2017-favourites
Honestly Toni Morrison could write her drink order on a napkin and I would love it.
Jul 01, 2018Jon(athan) Nakapalau rated it it was amazing
Shelves: cultural-studies, favorites, sociology, history, politics, crime, psychology, philosophy
Toni Morrison has long been on my list of authors to read - but I never seem to have time to make for her. Now I will - this book was beyond any expectations I had. I can truly say that this slim volume has opened my eyes wide to so many issues in which we make other people 'Others' who are not like us - and hence do not deserve the same consideration we give to those we consider like 'Us'. This book should be right alongside The True Believer by Eric Hoffer - highest recommendation.
Sep 20, 2017Book Riot Community added it
DISCLAIMER: I have not read this book, which is the transcripts of a series of lectures Morrison gave about the themes that preoccupy her books. But I feel like it’s not getting any press anywhere, and how can that be, when people need to know that there’s a new ToMo book out in the world!!! And even better, with an introduction by Ta-Nehisi Coates! Consider yourself informed now.
Backlist bump: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Tune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things new...more
Since this book only took me a day to read, I will likely go back and read it again. Contained in it's 111 pages is so much that cannot possibly be absorbed in one read through. From the introduction through to the end of the 6th lecture, there is so much that we still need to learn, that I still need to learn. To deconstruct the 'Other', we must know her and face her and realize that she is us. 'Race is the classification of a species, and we are the human race, period.' I highly recommend this...more
I honestly put this on my reading list because, I mean, it's Toni Morrison. But it gets 5 stars not just because it's Morrison, but because she is genius. This tiny book packs so much into just a few pages. For a lover of Morrison's body of literature this is a treat or an invitation for those new to Morrison. I have often been troubled by the way that 'celebrated' white writers have treated race and the Other in their work and Morrison articulated it in a way that I never could. I highly recomm...more
Sep 11, 2017Kathrin rated it really liked it
Separating the 'us' from the 'other' has been used to strengthen the 'us' in order to have a common enemy. It's a strategy to peg groups of people against each other. Toni Morrison's reviews this concept of 'othering' with examples in literary works of her own and of other authors. This collection of essays is very current in the light of the political climate in the USA, but also on a grander scale due to globalization and the refugee crisis in Europe.
While I liked this a lot, it felt like Morrison could have gone a little deeper. Maybe it's only meant to serve as an intro to her works, as opposed to fully-fleshed out analytical essays. Worth reading!
------------ 3.5 stars. The Origin of Others is a collection of lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 2016, that serves as a potent and relevant read. The lectures explore the theme of 'Othering,' that is the act of defining/creating the outsider. It's funny how this book feels simultaneous...more
A great series of essays (lectures, really) concerning the Other (who that is and how they are classified) and how literature contextualizes the constructs of how we view them. There’s a lot of food for thought here and I loved that Morrison pulled examples from her novels and provided insight into the artistic decisions she made to address race, class, and “the Other”. In his introduction to the text, Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Morrison “one of the finest writers and thinkers this country has ever...more
Oct 06, 2017Sara rated it really liked it
I enjoyed Toni Morrison's explanations of how she incorporated various dynamics of race into different of her fictions. I appreciated how she was explaining how she used fiction to attempt to explore and understand the constructs of blackness and whiteness and otherness. Her discussions about how 'othering' others reduces people from individuals to non-human ciphers on which one can project what one wants for their own benefit reminds me of one of the themes explored in Infinite Jest.
Sep 09, 2017Joslyn Allen rated it really liked it
Shelves: arc, black-americans, poc, essay, race, women-s-voices
Review published: https://chronicbibliophilia.wordpress...
'Language (saying, listening, reading) can encourage, even mandate, surrender, the breach of distances among us, whether they are continental or on the same pillow, whether they are distances of culture or the distinctions and indistinctions of age or gender, whether they are the consequences of social invention or biology.' On this day - September 12, 2017 - the newest works of two heavyweights are being released to likely widely differin...more
I admit to believing Toni Morrison’s writing is perfect. Reading The Origin of Others only reinforces this belief. This book is an examination of prevalent themes in Morrison’s work such as color-ism, racism, and slavery especially in the novels Paradise, Beloved, and The Bluest Eye. Why is literature set up so that one group is seen as acceptable, wholly realized individuals and any person not belonging to that group seen as other or less than? We know literature most likely is rooted in realit...more
Interesting that she dives into her own fiction to elucidate some of the issues of race and power structures in America that her novels already seems to embody. I was hoping these lectures turned essays would ride closer to Playing in the Dark - as in a close reading of Hemingway and Faulkner and O'Connor. Some points I wish were further explored. Guess I just have to wait for her next novel!
Jan 04, 2018Never Without a Book™ rated it it was amazing
I end my crazy long day with Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others. Short , sweet, and to the point. Toni Morrison walks you through literature, racism/race, whiteness, and the creation of the Other. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a powerful Foreword to the book in which he describes Toni as “one of the finest writers and thinkers this country has ever produced.” I would be inclined to agree.
Nov 20, 2017Read By RodKelly rated it it was amazing
It was too short!!! Toni Morrison is simply brilliant and of course I enjoyed this insightful little collection of the essays!
Jun 28, 2019Fran rated it really liked it
There is a lot to process while reading this short book. At moments the thoughts swirling through my head made it hard to breathe. I feel transformed as a result. Morrison not only touches on the 'romance of slavery' and highlights the more salient examples in literature but she calls for the reader to examine their thoughts and actions in relation to the present day climate around the world. Thoughtfully she explains the purpose of most of her books and cries out for society to unite under the...more
Race it the classification of a species and we are the human race, period. Then what is this other thing – the hostility, the social racism, the Othering? Pg. 15
I especially appreciated the first part of this book with its focus of “Being or Becoming the Stranger” which is really the starting point to think about racism. I suppose the idea of “the Other” it is a starting point for thinking about humans in all aspects of engagement with the world and could be applied to not just people, but anima...more
3.5 Nov 20, 2017Sherri rated it it was amazing
I appreciate when my favorite writers do double duty as novelists, as well as critics. (See also, Chinua Achebe's adapted lectures and works of criticism. Morrison is indeed in conversation with him). For the most part, I found the lectures accessible and illuminating. For instance, I don't think I've noticed Morrison's refusal to explicitly racialize her characters, even though she has also made it quite clear that she is writing about Black people. I also appreciated that she references he...more Toni Morrison Strangers Full Text
Shelves: race, african-american, adult-nonfiction
I remembering seeing Toni Morrison speak about 20 years ago. Her book Paradise had just come out, and she read sections from it. This book, a transcript of her 2016 lectures, reminds me of that experience. In many of these lectures, Morrison shares how Paradise and several other of her books illuminate the complexities of 'otherness' and also how they connect to our polarized political climate today. I really appreciated hearing her commentary about the books I've read (about half) and I'd like...more
I read this book pretty quickly and I enjoyed it. I don’t want my low ranking to scare anyone away. I’ve watched Morrison’s lectures on YouTube and I was pretty excited to read this one. Unfortunately it covered topics that I’ve already heard her speak/write about, so I felt disappointed and I definitely wanted to read more.
This is a fascinating book by Ms Toni Morrison! It’s gives the reason why race matters from 6 different perspectives and literary examples to support them. I love a book that gives me even more books to read! ?
Nov 11, 2017Beverly rated it it was amazing
thoughts coming shortly
Nov 19, 2017Havebooks Willread rated it really liked it
Toni Morrison is one of those people who thinks on such a higher plane than I do that I am wowed every time I read something of hers. I am certain I only grasped a small percentage of the gems she shares in this short collection of lectures and could benefit from a re-reading in a few years.
I especially enjoyed the way she examined the role race plays in literature, referencing and discussing works by people such as Hemingway, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Flannery O'Connor, Joseph Conrad, and her own...more
These six lectures take the reader through coded language designed by the powers that be to differentiate between who belongs in the group and who does not. Morrison pulls from different stages of American history, from antebellum history to the most active periods of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century to Jim Crow to our more recent history.
This exploration challenges a whitewashed view of not only history but a culture which is defined in the States more by color than by any re...more
Aug 20, 2018Jenna rated it it was amazing
'The Origin of Others' is a short but powerful book. It is based on the series of Norton lectures that Toni Morrison delivered at Harvard in 2016. In it she discusses the human concept of Otherness. Where does this come from? What makes us fear and hate people we perceive as different from us? Why do we need to identify people as 'Others'? Drawing on examples from literature, both her own and other American writers, Ms. Morrison delves into the history of race and racism in America.
It is amazing...more
Feb 09, 2018Mridula rated it it was amazing
Every time I hear that Toni Morrison has published a new book I immediately make room/space to digest her words. Thus it was with The Origin of Others. At 118 pages and almost pocket size it is a short but mighty read. Morrison references her (and others) work to name the continued atrocities of racism and 'othering'. She names how social and dehumanizing constructions of 'race' continue to violate and oppress others.
Morrison's words are powerful and insightful. The last few pages focus on Cama...more
I love Toni Morrison. I've seen her in person and she's amazing. Funny, sincere, heart breaking in many ways. But I didn't enjoy this book. It was very 'academic' (for lack of a better word) and while I learned a few points that were 'light bulb' moments for me regarding racism, the language was too complex for me. Which of course, makes me look and feel like an idiot--but it's an academic read for sure.
A powerful and compelling transcribed lecture that examines othering in life and in literature, including the author's own works.
As wonderful and thoughtful as the nonfiction parts are, I most cherished a long except from _Beloved_ that lands near the end of the book. I've read _Beloved_ 3 times, and I'm glad to know it can still hit me right between the eyes.... [warning: it's very much a love it or hate it kind of book].
Oct 28, 2017Sarah Weathersby rated it really liked it
Ta-Nehesi Coates wrote the 16-page Foreword for this book. (A book of 114 pages that fit in the palm of my hand) He has remarkable insight into the challenges of black people dealing with racism.
But when it comes to Toni Morrison, what is an 'Other?' Ms. Morrison's text does not use the word 'race,' but characterizes 'Others,' by the ways in which they interact. They can be male or female, sometimes ghosts that walk. If you have read her book 'Beloved,' you know what 'Others' can be.
Jan 24, 2018Tammy rated it it was amazing
Toni Morrison will forever be my literary lodestar, and the insight into her mind as she confronts the idea of the Other is beyond special to me. This small collection of her 2016 Norton Lectures at Harvard is both timely and timeless. I fear we will never escape the consequences of slavery and the mental and moral magic act necessary to build a society on the backs of slaves, but at least we have Morrison (and Coates) to help us understand and try to do better.
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Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) was an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author 'who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.'
Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best k...more
“The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one’s racial-ized rank is to lose one’s own valued and enshrined difference.”
“Kalabalıklar içinde olmak isteyenler yalnızlık çekenlerdir hep.” More quotes…
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The Most Beautiful Toni Morrison Quotes
Photo: James Keyser/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.
Toni Morrison, who passed away last night at the age of 88, already taught us how to remember her.
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives,” Morrison said during her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1993.
A writer, editor, professor, and thinker extraordinaire, Morrison “did” language unlike anyone else. Best known for her 1988 novel Beloved, the story of an escaped slave who kills her newborn child, Morrison revolutionised literature by placing the stories of Black people at the forefront. She sought to demolish what she called the 'lobby,' or the comfortable, inviting threshold between a white reader and black text. She leaves behind 11 novels and a trove of wisdom for readers, writers, and people moving through the world.
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Here are some of Morrison's best quotes — lanterns that briefly illuminate the mystery we live in.
“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
'Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn — by practice and careful contemplations — the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma.'
“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
'I think that our expectations of women are very low. If women just stand up straight for thirty days, everybody goes, Oh! How brave!'
Toni Morrison Strangers Full Text Movie
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'Nagging. Poison. Gossip. Sneaking around instead of confrontation.'
“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.”
“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
“She’s a friend of my mind. She gathers me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them right back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
“It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility and a dead end.”
“Racists always try to make you think they are the majority, but they never are. It’s always the minority against all of the poor, all of the women, or all of the blacks.”
“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
Stranger Toni Morrison Discussion Questions
“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
“If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
'When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, 'Don’t pay any attention to that.' First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialise on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.
Toni Morrison Strangers Full Text Book
'I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little coloured girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you...If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water.'
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'Everything I see or do, the weather and the water, buildings...everything actual is an advantage when I am writing. It is like a menu, or a giant tool box, and I can pick and choose what I want. When I am not writing, or more important, when I have nothing on my mind for a book, then I see chaos, confusion, disorder.'
“Your life is already artful — waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.”
'Make up a story. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You...can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”
“That was the wonderful liberation of being divorced and having children. I did not mind failure, ever, but I minded thinking that someone male knew better. He knew better about his life, but not about mine. I had to stop and say, Let me start again and see what it is like to be a grown-up.”
“They made certain demands, but they didn’t care if I was sexy or hip, or any of those things that seem to factor in how we are judged—or at least how I was judged, as a woman in the publishing industry, by a certain kind of ambition. Other than taking rudimentary care of them, they just wanted me to be honest, and have a sense of humor, and be competent. That was simpler for me. Outside was complicated. But the writing was the real freedom, because nobody told me what to do there. That was my world and my imagination.”
'I take control of them. They are very carefully imagined. I feel as though I know all there is to know about them, even things I don’t write—like how they part their hair. They are like ghosts. They have nothing on their minds but themselves and aren’t interested in anything but themselves. So you can’t let them write your book for you. I have read books in which I know that has happened—when a novelist has been totally taken over by a character. I want to say, You can’t do that. If those people could write books they would, but they can’t. You can. So, you have to say, Shut up. Leave me alone. I am doing this.'
'There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.'
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Strangers Toni Morrison Pdf
'You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.'
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