We live in the age of spectacle, of news all the time. Instead, the opposite occurs. Startling, unrelated events jumbled together on the nightly news are presented as if the world were incoherent. She cited the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, the O.J. Simpson trial and special prosecutor Ken Starr's investigation of President Clinton as examples of spectacle that have exacerbated, rather than healed, the fissures relating to race and sex within our society. Literature experiences us as multidimensional persons.
Literature deals with consequences.
She asserted that the importance of community and a shared public life to our sense of self are contained in her own writing, in particular in her three most-recent novels, Beloved, Jazz and Paradise. That theme is representative of how Morrison hopes readers will interact with her books. The books are about what they're about, but they are also about you. If you go back and reread Beloved again in two years, it will be different, because you will be different. During the colloquium, Morrison, whose writings are the second most popular subject for honors theses at Cornell, after Shakespeare's, answered questions from Hortense Spillers, Ken Stuckey and Satya Mohanty, three Cornell professors who teach her work.