FICTIONALIZING SIGNIFYING IN TONI MORRISON'S NOVELS

Fictionalizing Signifyin(g) in Toni Morrison’s Novels comprises five interconnected articles on how Gates’s concept of Signifyin(g) amalgamates black women’s experiences with Henderson’s notion of self-reflexiveness in black writing. From the perspective of black dialogical intertextuality and the call-and-response phenomenon this book amplifies my previous discussion of black women’s spiritual and political conversion in Jarena Lee’s spiritual tale and Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative. (See Martins 2018) My decision to propose this publication as a sequence to the previous work associates Toni Morrison’s black women’s experiences with Lee’s spiritual life along with Linda Brent’s political living through a methodological apparatus of five analytical elements: antagonizing setting and agent supporting agent women’s purposes and the narratives’ outcome. Methodological organization makes feasible the establishment of the validity of Henderson’s self-reflexiveness and Gates’s Signifyin(g) both as conversational or dialogical glue joining the texts together through their racial content and narrating development.