The Nobel Lecture in Literature

The Nobel Lecture in Literature Literary Elements

Genre

Speech/fable

Setting and Context

An old woman's home in a rural area outside town

Narrator and Point of View

Morrison speaks from the first person as she narrates this fable, and describes the thoughts and words of her characters in the third person.

Tone and Mood

Morrison's tone is solemn, grave, and authoritative. The mood of the lecture is serious but hopeful.

Protagonist and Antagonist

Old woman and young children/Living language and dead language

Major Conflict

Although there is no major conflict in the lecture, one might read a conflict in the fable between those that advocate for dead language and the writers that produce living, diverse narratives.

Climax

N/A

Foreshadowing

N/A

Understatement

N/A

Allusions

Morrison alludes to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis. In the story, the ancient Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a tall and grandiose tower. Their plans were foiled by a multitude of languages: none of the workers could understand each other. In Morrison's fable, the old woman wonders what would have happened if the workers had all taken the time to try to understand each other here on Earth.

As an example of the power of living language, the old woman in the fable also alludes to President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863 on the Civil War battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Imagery

Morrison's style is deeply evocative in its descriptive imagery. She grounds abstract concepts about language and justice through the use of personification, metaphor, and adjective after adjective.

Paradox

N/A

Parallelism

N/A

Metonymy and Synecdoche

N/A

Personification

Toni Morrison wields personification as a significant tool in her speech. From the start, language is personified, as Morrison describes the discursive and material effects of different forms of narrative. Yet Morrison's point is not exactly aligned with the traditional view of personification, which imagines it as endowing something not alive with life. Instead, Morrison's point is that language is alive; it shapes people and countries and cultures; it acts and impacts the world in real ways. Morrison embraces this tension, using personification to describe language as a force that "drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability . . . " but at the same time writing, "Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence."

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