Playing the changes : from Afro-modernism to the jazz impulse / Craig Hansen Werner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Werner, Craig Hansen, 1952-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

African Americans--Music--History and criticism.

African Americans.

African Americans--Music.

Music and literature--History--20th century.

Music and literature.

History.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

Modernism (Literature).

United States.

African Americans in literature.

African American aesthetics.

Jazz in literature.

Physical Description:

xxvi, 341 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [1994]

Summary:

In Playing the Changes, Craig Hansen Werner presents a polyrhythmic approach to the continuities and discontinuities of the American literary tradition. He focuses on the relationship between two superficially distinct traditions: European (post)modernism and African American culture in both literary and musical forms. A primary contribution of Playing the Changes is its exploration of different "phrasings" of issues important to highly conscious African American artists from the late nineteenth century (Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman) to the 1990s (Toni Morrison's Jazz). A final sequence highlights the centrality of black music to African American writing, arguing that recognizing blues, gospel, and jazz as theoretically suggestive cultural practices rather than specific musical forms points to what is most distinctive in twentieth-century African American writing: its ability to subvert attempts to limit its engagement with psychological, historical, political, or aesthetic realities.

Contents:

Introduction: (Re) Phrasings and the Study of African-American Literature xv

Part 1 Afro-Modernist Dialogues

1 The Framing of Charles W. Chesnutt 3

2 Endurance and Excavation: Afro-American Responses to Faulkner 27

3 The Brier Patch as (Post) modernist Myth: Morrison, Barthes, and Tar Baby As-Is 63

4 On the Ends of Afro-Modernist Autobiography 84

Part 2 Studies in African-American Poetics

5 Black Dialectics: Kennedy, Bullins, Knight, Dumas, Lorde 103

6 Black Blues in the City: The Voices of Gwendolyn Brooks 142

7 Blues for T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes: Melvin B. Tolson's Afro-Modernist Aesthetic 162

Part 3 Playing the Changes: Gospel, Blues, Jazz

8 Bigger's Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of Afro-American Modernism 183

9 James Baldwin: Politics and the Gospel Impulse 212

10 Leon Forrest and the AACM: The Jazz Impulse and the Chicago Renaissance 241

11 The Burden and the Binding Song: August Wilson's Neoclassical Jazz 263

Epilogue: Improvisations toward a New Phrasing: West Afrocentrism, Meta-Funk, and the Interiors of Jazz 288.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [305]-315) and index.

ISBN:

0252021126

OCLC:

29670944