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Transcription: [00:07:57]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
"a quantity of lively material of incredible richness,"
[00:08:00]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
and I think what Brooks says there describes this portrait very well.
[00:08:05]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
There's a couple of other things that, uh, that I pulled off of McCurdy's notes, I liked.
[00:08:16]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
He says "Ultimately," and he's quoting Roland Bart here,
[00:08:19]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
"ultimately, photography is not subversive, but when it frightens,"
[00:08:23]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
not-- "is subversive, not when it frightens, repels or even stigmatizes,but when it is pensive, when it thinks."
[00:08:30]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
And again, that's this drawing us into this image; this locking us in and taking us with it.
[00:08:37]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
And then I like this from Robert Frost, also he says,
[00:08:40]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
"There is nothing as mysterious as something that is clearly seen."
[00:08:44]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
And, and you pick up that, when you're drawn in, with that centripetal decay, that you just locked into this image,
[00:08:53]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
and he obliges you to come up with your own explanation for what's at work inside this portrait.
[00:08:59]

{Unknown Speaker 1}
Why don't we talk a little bit about Toni Morrison?
[00:09:02]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
[[coughs]] Pardon me.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford --
[00:09:08]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
oh, and we're blessed here. Casey is actually a Toni Morrison scholar,
[00:09:12]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
so if I, I run into a, if I run into a bind here, I'm going to appeal to, to her.
[00:09:17]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorraine, Ohio,
[[siren blaring]]
[00:09:22]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
which is slightly west of Cleveland, part of the Cleveland metropolitan area.
[00:09:27]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Her father was a welder in a shipyard, and her family came up from the South.
[00:09:32]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Like a lot of African-American families in the '20s, '30s, and '40s,
[00:09:37]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
there's a migration coming north, and it's to avoid the racism of the south.
[00:09:41]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
It's also to avoid mistreatment, but it's also to find opportunities in the north.
[00:09:46]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
It's, it's to find jobs, and uh, Cleveland, Detroit, these places, places of manufacture,
[00:09:52]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
are the uh, the end of this, this movement.
[00:09:56]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Early on, Toni Morrison enjoyed reading, and the folklore which was part of the Southern, of her Southern tradition.
[00:10:05]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
And this folklore, this storytelling in this, and uh, the things we see coming out of the south; the gothic components of that, are things that she's incorporated into her later work,
[00:10:19]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
especially in Beloved, which we're going to talk about in just a few minutes.
[00:10:23]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
She attended Howard University here in Washington, and later on, she went to, she received her Master's degree from Cornell.
[00:10:30]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
She received her Bachelor's here in 1953 and her Master's degree in 1955.
[00:10:35]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
She taught briefly at Texas Southern University in Houston, and then she returned to Howard in 1957, where she met Harold Morrison, an architect.
[00:10:44]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
They were married in 1958. Had 2 sons. A few years later, they were divorced.
[00:10:49]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
And, she moved to Syracuse. She took a job with Random House, hoping that it would eventually
[00:10:56]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
get her a job with Random House in New York, which it did.
[00:11:00]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Her first novel, "The Bluest Eye", was published in 1970,
[00:11:05]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
and followed by several more novels including Song of Solomon, which won the National Book Critics' Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1977.
[00:11:17]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Her novel "Beloved" was published in 1987, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
[00:11:25]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
In 1993, Toni Morrison was the first African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
[00:11:34]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Or, the first black woman to do so, second American woman to do so.
[00:11:36]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Pearl Buck actually received the Nobel Prize, uh, in, uh,--
[00:11:41]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Looking at my cheat sheet back here. Pearl Buck received her Nobel Prize in 1938.
[00:11:48]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Um, interestingly, Toni Morrison is the one who dubbed President Clinton, in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal in 1998,
[00:11:55]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
"The United States' First Black President,"
[00:11:58]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Uh, a quote from an article in the New Yorker in October of that year.
[00:12:02]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
I'm going to talk a little about Beloved, and talk about how, how Toni Morrison's work fits into the body of her contemporaries.
[00:12:12]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
She is not afraid to step boldly into the world of the fantastic and the paranormal.
[00:12:20]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
We see Toni Morrison using magical realism like we see Salmon Rushdie in "Midnight's Children",
[00:12:28]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
where the first thousand children born after India's independence have these magical gifts;
[00:12:34]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Angela Carter "Nights at the Circus", where things suddenly change scale when an ice sculpture shatters, and
[00:12:42]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
and you're one moment in this size of a world, and the next moment you're racing through a carpet as a small, small person;
[00:12:49]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - magical realism.
[00:12:53]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
In "Beloved", the magical reality consists-- contains the ghost of a child killed by her mother.
[00:12:59]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
"Beloved" is based on the tragic story of an escaped slave, Margaret Garner.
[00:13:04]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
In 1851, Garner was about to be caught in Ohio and returned to slavery in Kentucky, when she attempted to kill her children rather than let them grow up in bondage.
[00:13:16]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Margaret Garner killed one of her children in this act.
[00:13:19]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Beloved is a fictional account of this tragedy, in which the dead child as a grown woman comes back to haunt the house of her mother.
[00:13:28]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
The child is killed, and because the mother cannot afford to have anything put on the stone to mark it,
[00:13:33]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
the mother allows herself to be sexually transgressed by the stone engraver
[00:13:38]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
in exchange for the 7 letters B-E-L-O-V-E-D to be carved on the dead baby's headstone.
[00:13:46]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
From that moment, the baby is called "Beloved".
[00:13:49]

{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
The following is from Beloved:
[00:13:53]

Transcription Notes:
note- in the first sentence the speaker is referring back to a quote he just read -- The Time Stamps go after the dialog and [Speaker} needed to be added throughout. There was more than one speaker here, too.