Gillan, Jennifer. “Focusing on the Wrong Front: Historical Displacement, the Maginot Line, and ‘The Bluest Eye.’” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 2, 2002, pp. 283–298. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1512261

Booth, W. James. “The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison.” Political Theory, vol. 36, no. 5, 2008, pp. 683–707. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20452661

Greer, Jenna Rey. Deconstructing Whiteness Using Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. 2010.

Reddy, Maureen T. “Invisibility/Hypervisibility: The Paradox of Normative Whiteness.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, vol. 9, no. 2, 1998, pp. 55–64. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43587107.

Hersi, Asli, Hersi. Rethinking Racism in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2016). Web.

Sen, Sharmila. Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America. 2018.

I used a combination of Hunter’s One search, Google scholar, Jstor and Muse to find sources relating to my topic of hypervisibility/invisibility. I found out after repeatedly hitting a dead end that it would be difficult to solely search keywords whilst using just the author’s name or the title of the books. I can across a few blogs that were simple criticism of the books but nothing extensive or thorough enough for my research. I then headed back to the above listed sites and tried a different approach, which then led me in the right direction using broader keywords about Morrison’s Bluest Eye, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Rankine’s Citizen.

Research Question: What does Toni Morrison mean, in her novel The Bluest Eye, that the Breedloves put on their ugliness like a garment? Or that ugliness can be adopted or done away with, when she writes: “Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness… was behavior, the rest of the family… wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them (38).”

1. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982, pp. 777–795. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343197.

I found this article in an odd sort of way in that I thought the idea of forming a “subject” was so vague and yet so specific a topic that Foucault must have written an article about it. I then put into a BING.com search bar “Foucault how do you become a subject” and the name of this article (or rather afterward to a book he had written) was the first result beneath the author’s Wikipedia page. I then went into JSTOR and found that exact article.

2. Mahaffey, Paul Douglas. “The Adolescent Complexities of Race, Gender, and Class in Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye.’” Race, Gender & Class, vol. 11, no. 4, 2004, pp. 155–165. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43496824.

I found this article on JSTOR by searching “The Bluest Eye”.

3. Burt, Janeula M., Halpin, Glennelle. “African American Identity Development: A Review of the Literature.” Mid-South Educational Research Association. November 1998.

Again, I had found this source in the bibliography of another article I had searched for a separate English class, and when I could not find it in any of the databases we discussed in the library, I searched for the article by typing in the title into the BING.com search bar. I found a link for the entire speech (the reading of a paper the authors had written) that was published in 1998.

4.  Brittian, Aerika S. “Understanding African American Adolescents’ Identity Development: A Relational Developmental Systems Perspective.” The Journal of black psychology vol. 38,2 (2011): 172-200. doi:10.1177/0095798411414570.

This article was listed in the BING search results of the article above.

Bouson, J. Brooks. “‘Quiet As It’s Kept’: Shame and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 363, Gale, 2014. Literature Criticism Online, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/ICZSMX031801056/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=274ea0b2. 

Mayo, James. “Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Children’s Literature Review, edited by Tom Burns, vol. 99, Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420059149/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=d6f513f7. 

Zender, Karl F. “Faulkner and the Politics of Incest.” American Literature, vol. 70, no. 4, 1998, 739–765. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2902390.

Noble-Goodman, Stuart. “Mythic guilt and the burden of sin in Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’ (Ralph Ellison).” The Midwest Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 4, 1998, p. 409+. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20992288/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=3cd5280b.

Awkward, Michael. “Roadblocks and Relatives: Critical Revision in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 173, Gale, 2003. Literature Criticism Online, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/NMVJBK163758806/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=233aae60. 

Research Question:

What psychological theories are present in The Bluest Eye that help examine and explain the behaviors of some of the characters? What theorists can be used to explain the dynamics that affect and shape the characters’ lives and moral conduct?

Theory – Trauma theory

Characters – Pecola and Cholly

Bibliography

“Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory).” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, by Cathy Caruth, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 91–112.

Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 149–166. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44029500.

Brooks Bouson , J. “Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.’” Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame and Writing, by Joseph Adamson and Hilary Anne Clark, State University of New York Press, 1999, pp. 207–236.

Ramírez, M. L. (2013). “The Theme of the Shattered Self in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye And A Mercy”. Miscelánea, 48, 75-91. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/docview/1497043922?accountid=27495

Vickroy, L. (1996). “The politics of abuse: The traumatized child in Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras”. Mosaic, 29(2), 91. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1300043843?accountid=27495

Jozwiak, Elisabeth Mermann. “Re‐Membering the Body: Body Politics in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10436920108580287?journalCode=glit20.

Malmgren, Carl D. “Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 173, Gale, 2003. Literature Criticism Online, http://link.galegroup.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/QKPMSE517876176/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=04d83dce. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019. Originally published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 41, no. 3, Spring 2000, pp. 251-262.

Moses, Cat. “The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999, pp. 623–637. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2901343.

Pal, Payel and Neelakantan, Gurumurthy. “Morrison’s Prostitutes in The Bluest Eye.” Notes on Contemporary Literature. Volume 44. Pages 4-7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261527825_Morrison’s_Prostitutes_in_The_Bluest_Eye

Rickard, Wendy, and Merl Storr. “Editorial: Sex Work Reassessed.” Feminist Review, no. 67, 2001, pp. 1–4. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1395526.

In searching for these articles, I mostly focused on seeking out journal publications concerning the analysis of the characters China, Poland, and Miss Marie in The Bluest Eye. I found most of the articles listing above by searching their names in Google Scholar and the library portal. It was difficult to find articles solely focused on these characters, so the articles I found look more broadly at the themes of victimization, subjugation and issues revolving around the body found in The Bluest Eye, all of which have analyses of these characters. I was also interested in finding an overview of sex work in America, and I consulted one of the journals to which Hunter subscribes that covers a broader range of subjects than the literary journals.