Gillan, Jennifer. “Focusing on the wrong front: historical displacement, the Maginot Line, and The Bluest Eye.” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 2, 2002, p. 283+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A89872243/AONE?u=cuny_hunter&sid=AONE&xid=82c9b322. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
Hovet, Grace Ann, and Barbara Lounsberry. “Flying as Symbol and Legend in Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye,’ ‘Sula,’ and ‘Song of Solomon.’” CLA Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, 1983, pp. 119–140. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44321768. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
McWeeny, Jennifer. “Topographies of Flesh: Women, Nonhuman Animals, and the Embodiment of Connection and Difference.” Hypatia, vol. 29, no. 2, 2014, pp. 269–286. www.jstor.org/stable/24542034. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
Vasquez, Sam. “In Her Own Image: Literary and Visual Representations of Girlhood in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, p. 58+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A365688777/AONE?u=cuny_hunter&sid=AONE&xid=d1f1dab9. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
Wong, Shelley. “Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye.” Callaloo, vol. 13, no. 3, 1990, pp. 471–481 .JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2931331. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
In beginning my research for this project, I knew I would mainly be relying on the resources provided by databases accessed through the Hunter Library. However, I also planned to utilize the New York Public Library databases, as demonstrated to me by a NYPL staff member during a trip with my translation theory class last year, which I’ve come to see as invaluable, especially for more niche research topics. In searching through these two portals, I realized that my main citations would come from JSTOR and Academic Search Premiere. Combining my search terms of “Toni Morrison” and/or “The Bluest Eye” with “animal,” “nature,” and “bird” produced an acceptable amount of success, supplying a fair number of articles that I could choose from, but honestly not as many as I hoped for. Between the two portals, I think I browsed every peer-reviewed journal related to animal imagery in the novel, and was surprised with how few examine the book in this context, especially in comparison to some other critical lenses. This may not be a bad thing!
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Great work. You’re right that it’s not a bad thing to find relatively few sources on your topic when dealing with a text as closely examined by critics as TBE. This means you’re onto something new!
Have you considered looping Rankine into this topic? Her focus on the animal strikes me as relevant here: the strange image of the caribou (or whatever) with the human face as well as her several mentions of animality in the text…
Funny enough, it was actually my blog post on Citizen that drove me toward my essay topic! I think it may prove useful to reinterpret some of the elements of that post for part of it, if I were to use Rankine as a supplemental material. However, I wouldn’t want to expand my scope too far and lose focus on Morrison, so if I incorporate anything from Rankine I would want to do it on a smaller scale to elucidate other points. I’m finding so much material the deeper I dig!