Beloved is one of the more powerful stories you're likely to ever read, and you know how poststructuralists feel about power. Toni Morrison throws us into a house haunted by murder and grief, where traumatic memories of slavery and abuse lurk around every corner. Morrison wrote in a Foreword to the novel that "[t]o render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way."
So where does that leave a theorist who's most interested in watching how language works?
That's one of the hardest questions we can put to poststructuralism, and reading Beloved is a good place to start. To dig even deeper, you might ask yourself: how might a deconstructive/poststructuralist interpretation of this novel limit your understanding of what the book accomplishes? Do deconstructive/poststructuralist framings of language as power provide any insight into this text?