What is the Nature of Time in Toni Morrison’s Beloved? — Watch Episode 3 of Prof. Ato Quayson’s Vlog

The third episode of Professor Ato Quayson’s vlog Critic.Reading.Writing is up!

In this week’s episode, Quayson returns for Part 2 of his discussion of Beloved by Toni Morrison. Whereas Part 1 discussed the meaning of freedom and slavery from the perspective of Baby Suggs, Part 2 engages the multilayered relationship between time, memory, and regret for Sethe.

This 30-minute episode explores Sethe’s philosophy of time and how Beloved re-frames Sethe’s memories to break the narrative out of a linear historical framework. Quayson challenges readers to conceptualize time in terms of re-coding history and re-memory, explaining:

Re-memory implies that time does not flow like a river, but rather, time is granulated in that each granule subsists in itself as a container of the event…The sensory indices of the past produce forms of emotional intensity that are attached to the present moment.

Click below to watch!

Critic.Reading.Writing with Ato Quayson is the show for booklovers hungry for meaningful conversations about books.

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