Beloved – Toni Morrison Critical Analysis

For your second paper, you will advance a nuanced reading of key moments in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved. You will organize these individual readings around a clearly defined thesis, one that
takes an argumentative risk for which your textual analysis will form the support. Additionally,
your paper will make this argument in relation to a secondary text, triangulating your own
interpretation of Beloved in conversation with this second source.
While a secondary text is required, you have the freedom to determine what its role with respect
to your central argument should be. For example, your secondary text might coin a unique term
(“double-consciousness,” “wake work,” or others) that provide an important lens through which
your own analysis of Beloved can operate. Instead of this, however, your secondary text might
represent a direct analysis of Beloved that fails to take into account an element of the text you
can illustrate through your own thesis. However you choose to involve your secondary text, it
should neither eclipse your own interpretation nor be relegated wholly to the sidelines, but
instead form an important part of the literary toolbox with which you analyze the novel.
NOTE: Due to the rich historical context of our primary text, it is important to remember that
your ultimate argument in this paper is not one about demonstrating the nature of the historical
period in which it is set, but instead an argument about the specific literary choices Morrison
makes in representing this history. At the end of the day, make sure any outside reference
(whether to your secondary text or to slavery itself) operates in service of your analysis of the
formal elements of the book, not the other way around.
As always, successful papers will prove their thesis through a series well-selected examples
(from primary as well secondary texts), careful analysis of those examples, and creative
connections between these moments of analysis. You will show your reader something about the
texts that they would not have seen upon a first reading by connecting smaller formal choices to
larger thematic concerns.