LLC48: Toni Morrison’s Model of Literature and Public Life

Collaborative Goals

“The problem … is, as I see it, the loss of public life, which is exacerbated by the degradation of private life. And I am proposing literature as an amelioration to this crisis in ways even literature could not have imagined.” (Toni Morrison at Cornell University, 1988) These ideas voiced Morrison’s concern about what she perceived as a distortion in conversations on “issues of conscience, morality, law, and ethics” in public life and the urgency for literature in restoring forms of public life that embrace those issues. She poses the question “How and where can we experience the public in time, in language, as affect, and in context in order to participate fully in our own personal, singular, even invented life in relation to the life of the various communities to which we claim or wish to belong?” For Toni Morrison, novelist (admittedly) this societal dilemma can best be— indeed, must be—challenged through literature, especially, as well as other art forms. The focus of this working group is creating fora in which to contemplate how Toni Morrison’s own corpus, as well as “fictional literature [more broadly], can be an alternative language that can contradict and elude or analyze the regime, the authority of the electronically visual, the seduction of ‘virtual.’” Inspired by Morrison's concern about "the loss of public life" and her vision of literature as "an amelioration to this crisis," our Working Group uses a collaborative approach to bridge academic study and public appreciation of Morrison’s work through four interconnected aims:

1. Preserving and celebrating Morrison's legacy through academic and cultural events;
2. Creating accessible opportunities for scholars and the broader public to experience and discuss Morrison's work;
3. Engaging scholarly and the broader community with other literary works as alternative language in public life through collaborative programming; and
4. Fostering community engagement through collaborative programming.