ARTS The Michigan Daily Friday, October 7, 1988 Page 7 Works cross all cultural boundaries... BY CHERIE CURRY AND MARGIE HEINLEN IT'S a Beloved thrill to envision Sula, the turbulent Tar Baby sing the inspirational Song of Solomon. Tar Baby's eyes invoke a message. Read deep into The Bluest Eye. Ahhh, to be a fledgling poet, but what an honor to be an established novelist ... like Toni Morrison. The University should be unabashed in welcoming Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison today; after all, Morrison's writings have wel- comed achievements in every aspect of literature - from the degrees and the teaching to the writing and the editing. Morrison, the Schweitzer professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany, received her B.A. degree from Howard University and her M.A. degree from Cornell. She has also received more than a dozen honorary degrees from various universities and colleges. Morrison has taught at such universities as Texas Southern, Howard, Yale, Rutgers, and Standford, lectured at Bowdoin College, Uni- versity of California at Berkeley, and San Jose State University, and is trustee of the New York Public Library, co-chair of the Schomberg Commission for the Preservation of Black Culture, and member of the Queens College Advisory Board. As an editor at Random House, she steered such writers as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Muhammed Ali, Gayle Jones, and Andrew Young through publication processes. Morrison's major novels, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved have received extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon and the1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved . Both novels were chosen as the main selections of the Book of the Month Club in 1977 and 1987 respectively. Her first play, Dreaming Emmett, was commissioned by the New York State Writers In- stitute of the State University of New York in 1985. Meeting with favorable reviews, it drew audiences throughout New York and the entire Tri-State area. As for future projects, Morrison has accepted an appointment to the Robert F. Goheen Pro- fessorship in the Humanities Council at Princeton University. As the first incumbent of the Goheen Professor, Ms. Morrison will teach in Princeton's Creative Writing Program and will have the flexibility to participate in inter- disciplinary programs including Afro-American Studies, American Studies and Women's Studies. Her appointment will take effect in the Spring of 1989. This is probably one of the last chances to see Morrison to speak for a while, as she settles in at Princeton. Her presence at the University as part of the Tanner series on values has been part of a unified effort by the philosophy department. A committee invited her to speak at the University in the spring of 1986, long before the release of Beloved and its Pulitzer award- so the faculty and students are getting an excitingly timely honor. Appealing to questions relating to values in her own way for an academic audience, the series offers an opportunity to Morrison to speak her "unspoken" vision. A professor in the philo- sophy department comments, "Obviously such a powerful novelist who has made a contribution of first rank to Black literature, feminist literature, American literature, she would be perfect for the series." Morrison's themes established a strong desire for a more academic lecture on values as a issue within itself. Delivered with her unusually sen- sitive portrayals that have the unique ability to elicit personal identification, her novels often deal with questions about morals and conflicts inherent within them as they affect Blacks, women, and our culture in general. But her perspectives ignore traditional class, race and sex lines, allowing her to draw in a huge audience - which will be evidenced today at Rackham Lecture Hall. TONI MORRISON delivers the Tanner Lecture on Human Values, titled "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Afro-American Presence in American Literature", at 4 p.m. in Rackham Lecture Hall. A Symposium on the Tanner Lecture will follow the next morning at 9:30 a.m., Oct. 8, in Auditorium 4 in the Modern Language Building. Morrison, together with poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, and other scholars, will participate. Both the lecture and symposium are free. .making her 'Beloved' of her readers Toni Morrison: SEmancipating Force Turning away from her familiar contemporary gettings to the random violence of the Recon- struction, Beloved is more than any personal 0dyssey. Morrison sweeps the history of slavery and freedom into her characters - from Sethe's (the silouetted protagonist's) mother, a survivor of the slave ship crossings, to Denver, her child, who chronologically reaches out to the present. BY MARGIE HEINLEN JAMES Baldwin, pioneer of Afro- American fiction, has handed down a vision- there are truths in the words of the suffering, the down-trodden, the mad and those who have learned to hate themselves -truth able to emancipate us all. And Morrison - through her characters - nods, understanding Baldwin's wisdom: "That [a] man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth- and ,indeed, no church- can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is un- shakable." Toni Morrison- Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved - ranges prolific in human value and emotional scope throughouteachmof her novels. Awarded the highest accolade - the Pulitzer- for Beloved, a tale so unified that it rarely allows even the reader to escape. Turning away from her familiar contemporary settings to the random violence of the Recon- struction, Beloved is more than any personal odyssey. Morrison sweeps the history of slavery and freedom into her characters - from Sethe's (the silouetted protagonist's) mother, a survivor of the slave ship crossings, to Denver, her child, who chronologically reaches out to the present. The story emerges as a historical ghost story - her characters do not die - and at times it's uncertain rather they are dead memories or living shells. Sethe, a steely woman in her mid-thirties, escapes her own social realism raising her memories to symbolism. The word "Beloved," the seven letters Sethe could afford of the funeral mass sermon that begins "Dearly Beloved,..." on the headstone for her murdered two year old daughter are etched into the memories of each reader by Morrison. "But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan...- when one more step was the most she could see of the future. Other people went crazy, why couldn't she?" Beloved is a story that cuts across history and class structure to acknowledge the sane struggling to survive in an insane world. CLASSIFIED ADS! Call 764-0557 I- ,' . : ,' ..;. r Interested in writing about film, theater, music, books or dance? Join the Daily Arts Staff Call 763-0379 for details! A PEP RALLY FRIDAY NIGHT- 9pm WITH MICHIGAN STATE *Voted Michigan Daily's Best Burger in Ann Arbor! ... awardwinning burgers, friedvegeta6es, homemade desserts, soups & satads, ... GO BL UE!! Mon - Sat 11-8 551 S. Division (near South & West Quad) NOW OPEN Sun. 4-9 EI ev,-X X X XX Y T T ym NNNN NNNY NNww A question for all SENIORS: 1 r _ - _______ - -- F-- A AM I r COUPON With this entire ad- FREE BI 12 oz. drink BRIN expires A GR 10-13-88 I (ONE1 COUPON The Thin Blue Line COUPON!! -2 What is missing from this picture? I. i 4G IN THIS AD FOR. SEAT MOVIE DEAL! TICKET PER COUPON) Answer: You I Mr. North The Year My Voice Broke F - - I O _ _ _ a _ _ _ _ _ _ _ r _ A . \0000000000004W 6.00004 DO* 00 U Time is running out quickly! Make sure you get your portrait taken for the Michigan Ensian Yearbook (and your mother). Photographers will be on campus only one more week. Be sure to stop by the UGLi (2nd floor) today or next Monday through Friday (8:30 a.m.- 4:45 p.m.) to get you photo taken. You can also make an appointment there or reschedule a previous one with the secretary. "TkA lir h| rr| . Cr i""- :- All h nrn ,.- \/,-ke^li