{"product_id":"language-as-liberation-reflections-on-the-american-canon-hardcover-1","title":"Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon - Hardcover","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/reportcopyrightinfringement.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eReport copyright infringement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eToni Morrison\u003c\/b\u003e (Author), \u003cb\u003eClaudia Brodsky\u003c\/b\u003e (Introduction by), \u003cb\u003eClaudia Brodsky\u003c\/b\u003e (Notes by)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eBeloved \u003c\/i\u003eToni Morrison investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation's collective unconscious.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America's most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country's canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racialidentity--these \"Africanist\" presences are \"the shadow that makes light possible,\" as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors' own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWith profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation's canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. \"How,\" Morrison wonders, \"could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands . . . of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with--without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and\/or their descendants?\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eTo read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most penetrating and subversive way yet. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by her Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, \u003ci\u003eLanguage as Liberation\u003c\/i\u003e is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.\u003ch3\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eTONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. From 1989 to 2006, Morrison was the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.\u003c\/p\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 240\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 1.11 x 9.38 x 6.15 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e February 03, 2026\u003c\/div\u003e\n            ","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53043240141107,"sku":"9780593802748","price":39.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0300\/5595\/6612\/files\/cIErD79jsM9780593802748_781ab51b-c33a-471f-9584-552a76740099.webp?v=1770840846","url":"https:\/\/www.vysn.com\/products\/language-as-liberation-reflections-on-the-american-canon-hardcover-1","provider":"VYSN","version":"1.0","type":"link"}