The Mediation and Meaning of Black Music in Toni Morrison's Jazz and Love

• Main Authors: Wen-shiun Chen, 陳玟勳
• Other Authors: Wen-ching Ho
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/79940417739321219410

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 96 === This thesis explores how Toni Morrison demonstrates her idea of an African American novel form in Jazz and Love on the basis of a Black musical tradition. Chapter One examines the concept of the Black music tradition by drawing on studies of African musical aesthetics and communal philosophy. Central themes and narrative strategies in Toni Morrison’s fiction refer to a tradition associated with musical practices that can be traced back to African cultural roots. As presented in Jazz that jazz music perpetuates the African cultural heritage, Chapter Two looks into how jazz music motivates the characters in the novel to take up “music-making” as a means of community re-establishment. Morrison sets the characters within a jazz musical “site of memory” to evoke memories of their past and a sensibility embedded in a music tradition. As jazz music instigates the characters to interact with one another as to remake a Black community with shared experience and feelings, Morrison creates her own literary community by her novel. Chapter Three investigates Morrison’s scrutiny on the diluting effects of tradition of jazz music in “swing” from the perspective of “bebop” manifested in Love. While the novel’s narrative structure reflect a bebop characteristic of “dissonance” demonstrated in the female characters’ diverse ways of love for Bill Cosey, L serves as a traditional power to connect and further transform the lives of the Cosey women by evoking a sense of sharing and care for each other. As Love revises the positive attitude toward jazz music in Jazz, the two novels seen together reveal Morrison’s development as an African American writer and an inheritor of the Black musical tradition.