Talking Books: Toni Morrison Among the Ancestors

In his final work, Professor E. Victor Wolfenstein constructs a meta-narrative around the concept of Mother-Right, the Law of the Father, and boundary-transgression. Demonstrating his command of broad time periods and types of thought, Wolfenstein ranges from Sophocles and Plato to Freud, Marx, and W.E.B. Du Bois to explore narrative and intersectionality in three works by Toni Morrison: Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. In the process, Wolfenstein preserves the textual structure, and offers interpretations of the characters, themes, etc., of each text. In his words: “My hope is that all these narrative lines interpenetrate so that, in the end, one story has been told.”