Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Satisfaction of the Reading and Composition requirement. We will closely read seven of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, as well as a short story and some of her essays, considering the works in relation to: her interest in creating what she calls "village literature" and in writing literature that does "trope work" that intervenes in American representations of blackness and racial identity; her contributions to the renaissance of black women's writing (and African American literature in general) in the 1980s and 1990s.