A sense of place architecture in the fiction of Toni Morrison

Abstract

This thesis begins with a graphic exploration and analysis of Toni Morrison s fiction. It attempts to concretize the imagined spaces of the stories as well as map the unusual and idiosyncratic details of the architecture. There is an awareness that there is an origin for her architecture in real life, however what is recounted in the stories is a mutated architecture that is a product of Morrison s memory and imagination. Graphic and literary analysis look for the symbols and elements that are recurrent in the stories, as a way to grasp an idea of an architecture that is part of a particular and potent black fiction.