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Yvette Christiansë. Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics. New York: Fordham UP, 2013. 307 pp.
Reading Yvette Christiansë's monograph is no easy task. Articulated in five chapters, the book opens with a long explanatory introduction and closes with an epilogue. The choice of an epilogue rather than a conclusion-as one might expect from a scholarly work-is indicative of Christiansë's critical approach. The concluding part of a literary work-as the OED reminds us-the epilogue epitomizes the very nature of Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics. The book is a critical work about the art of writing, written in a style that is distant from scholarly technique and far more cognate with literary prose. Christiansë's subtle formal choices playfully engage with Morrison's oeuvre and its longstanding tradition of self-referential and self-aware writing. As Christiansë notes, "This book proceeds by reading Morrison's fictions in terms of their 'internal' operations and moves to a consideration of their intertextual relations" (27). Engaging with both fiction and nonfiction and with the early and most recent works, Christiansë offers innovative critical readings of Morrison's works. Rather than chronologically, this book engages with Morrison's work thematically, resulting in a more organic, cohesive, and coherent approach. Early on, Christiansë spells out her intentions: "I am especially concerned to understand how Morrison transforms her thematics into an ethical poetics that increasingly tries to understand the relation of her writing to the production or reproduction of a canon and what being drawn into a canon also demands of her writing" (5-6).
The book's main goal is a fascinating one; since Morrison's oeuvre forcefully engages with the ethical, theorizing an ethical poetics means rereading her work through an analysis...