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American Literature and The Psyche of the Writer

    Toni Morrison’s goal is to take what has been considered the standard of approaching American literature and to broaden it. Though her argument is applied to American literature, this argument is not specific to solely American literature. Morrison gained another perspective of American literature when examining the psyche of the writer and how language operates in the imagination of the writer.       Morrison describes her experiences reading, “I would like it to be clear at the outset that I do not bring to these matters solely or even principally the tools of a literary critic. As a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do” (3). When Morrison first read these literary traditions, she read them as a reader, and she was not yet a writer. She read American literature under the guidance of a literary critic or with a series of professors in her American literature classes. She was guided through the dominant approaches, ideas, and theories of literary crit