Differend in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Mehdi Amiri

Abstract


Through the process of passage of man's life, there are some conditions and situations wherein he remains silent and he cannot do anything in the response of others. A postmodern French thinker, Jean-François Lyotard articulates that man is forced to be silent in confronting to some situations and conditions. Lyotard states that man is incapable of representing and expressing his own inner emotions and thoughts in some conditions. This situation of unrepresentability and unanswerability is named differend by Lyotard. Due to Lyotard's differend, through reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the reader can notice that there are some conditions in which some characters are unable to represent and state their own feelings and ideas. In this sense, some black people or characters of the novel are surrounded by the conditions that they cannot utter themselves when they face others, especially white people. 


Keywords


Differend, Silence, Unanswerability, Unrepresentability, Utterance

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References


Child, Peter, and Roger Fowler. The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Emerling, Jae. Theory for Art History. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

---. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. George Van Den Abbeele. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Malpas, Simon. Jean-François Lyotard. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. London: Vintage, 1999.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.3p.181

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