Professor Autumn Womack

That kind of teleological or forward-moving plotting doesn't hold.

Her novels invite us to think much more about kind of the repetition and the cyclical and the never-ending, the past that just keeps coming back over.

And even the structure of the bluest eye is so recursive.

And so I think that's part of the temporal unfolding as progressive.

It just doesn't hold.

So she's got to rework it.

I think that's exactly right.

It's a it's a challenge, right, that Morrison is taking up.

But I think it's also it's such a writerly challenge to like, how do you find the form that matches the moment that you're trying to narrate or the historical circumstances or the your how do you find a narrative form to match your view of how time works?

And for her, the time is undoubtedly this time where the past is always kind of infusing the present.

And at least that's where we get to it ultimately with something like Beloved.

The first time I read Morrison, I don't know if this is a late arrival to Morrison.

Who can say?

I read her, which feels like the right time, though.

I read her when I was a junior in high school.

I grew up in Philadelphia.

We read Song of Solomon.

And that was my first introduction.

And I don't remember if I knew of her before.

It's not that's not part of the memory.