| Summary: | 碩士 === 淡江大學 === 西洋語文研究所 === 88 === Toni Morrison’s Jazz is greatly influenced by jazz music and “plays” out the lives of the ordinary black folks in the City of Harlem in the Twenty. The relationship between the music and the novel reveals the jazziness in the literary text and the fluidity and openness of Morrison’s Jazz. The dynamic interaction between the text and the reader inspires my further exploration of the processual and performative narrative of Jazz.
My purpose in this thesis is threefold. First, I would like to explore the musical poiesis through the inter-semiotic translation between the structural openness of musical jazz and the narrative indeterminacy of literary jazz. Second, I would like to theorize the role of the narrator as the trickster in trickster aesthetics. Instead of anthropomorphizing the narrator, Morrison focuses on the function or the performance of the narrator in Jazz that resembles the ensemble of musical jazz. Third, I wish to analyze how the major characters of Jazz trace the haunting past in the South as Jazz tells a story far from the glitter of the Jazz Age.
Chapter 1 is the introduction of this thesis. I outline oral traditions in African American expressions, give a synopsis of the critical opinions of Jazz, detail the major arguments of the thesis, and provide the summary of the novel for my further discussion. In Chapter 2, I will discuss the poiesis of the narrator and investigate how the trickster narrator uses multi-voiced utterances to continuously shift in time and place and thereby create a disruptive narrative demanding reader participation.
In Chapter 3, the theme of “trace” will be the focus to analyze the male protagonist Joe Trace from his endless transformations, which symbolize the historical predicament of his race. In Chapter 4, I will examine “talking” as the “speakerly text” in Violet Trace. My analysis will focus on Violet’s reaction to Joe’s affair, investigate Violet’s personal cracks, and how she breaks through her misery and trauma.
In conclusion, I will argue that “jazziness” signifies not just music but a way of life for African Americans who are subjects of the musical poiesis of literary Jazz.
|
|---|
