Call number: LD2668 .T4 1933 S75

This paradoxically titled collection of poems explores what the blues and blindness has come to mean to the author.

Thesis submitted in: Dec. 1998. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-[105]). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Chapter Chapter One: --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1. --- Signifying: An African American Speech Act --- p.1 / Chapter 2. --- Brief Background of Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson --- p.4 / Chapter 3. --- Blues Craze --- p.5 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- Blues Genre --- p.8 / Chapter 1. --- Defining' the Blues --- p.8 / Chapter 2. --- Interpretations of the Blues Genre --- p.12 / Chapter 3. --- Three Downhome Blues Singer's Interpretations of the Blues --- p.15 / Chapter 4. --- """You wanta signifyin' like" --- p.18 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Signifying and the Blues --- p.20 / Chapter 1. --- Signifying --- p.21 / Chapter 2. --- Implicature --- p.24 / Chapter 3. --- Face Threatening Acts --- p.34 / Chapter 4. --- Off Record FTAs --- p.35 / Chapter 5. --- Off Record FTAs and Signifying --- p.36 / Chapter 6. --- Off record FTA and Signifying in Blues --- p.39 / Chapter 7. --- Signifying and Call-and-Response --- p.42 / Chapter 8. --- Signifying and the Guitar --- p.47 / Chapter 9. --- Signifying and T in Blues Recordings --- p.51 / Chapter 10. --- Signifying and Spirituals --- p.54 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson --- p.60 / Chapter 1. --- Robert Jonhson (1911-1938) --- p.60 / Chapter 2. --- Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929) --- p.81 / Chapter Chapter Five: --- Conclusion --- p.98 / Bibliography --- p.103

This essay compares the figurative language of Bob Dylan’s albums The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) and Highway 61 Revisited (1965), with a focus on how Dylan remained engaged with societal injustices and human rights as he switched from acoustic to fronting a rock ‘n’ roll band. The essay argues that Dylan kept his critical stance on social issues, and that the poet’s usage of figurative language became more expressive and complex in the later album. In the earlier album Dylan’s critique, as seen in his use of figurative language, is presented in a more obvious manner in comparison to Highway 61 Revisited, where the figurative language is more vivid, and with a more embedded critical stance. / Uppsatsen jämför det figurativa språket i Bob Dylans skivor The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) och Highway 61 Revisited (1965), med ett fokus på hur Dylan fortsatte vara engagerad inom samhällsfrågor och mänskliga rättigheter när han gick över från akustisk solomusik till att leda ett rockband. Uppsatsen argumenterar för att Dylan behöll sin kritiska syn på samhällsfrågor, och att poetens användning av figurativt språk blev mer expressivt och komplext i det senare albumet. I det tidigare albumet är Dylans kritik, som den framstår i hans användning av figurativt språk, presenterad mer direkt i jämförelse med Highway 61 Revisited, där det figurativa språket är mer levande och innehåller en mer förtäckt kritik.

This thesis is an ethnography of how places like mountain pastures (jailoos), hydro-electric dams and holy sites (mazars) matter in striving for a good life. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in the Toktogul valley of Kyrgyzstan, this study contributes to theoretical questions in the anthropology of post-socialism, time, space, work and enjoyment. I use the term ‘moral geography’ to emphasize a spatial imaginary that is centred on ideas of ‘the good life’, both ethical and happy. This perspective captures an understanding of jailoos which connects food, health, wealth and beauty. In comparing attitudes towards a Soviet and post-Soviet dam, I reveal changes in the nature of the state, property and collective labour. People in Toktogul hold agentive places like mazars and non-personalized places like dams and jailoos apart, implying not one overarching philosophy of nature, but a world in which types of places have different gradations of object-ness and personhood. I show how people use forms of commemoration as a means of establishing connections between people, claims on land and aspirations of ‘becoming cultured’. I demonstrate how people draw on repertoires of epic or Soviet heroism and mobility in conceiving their life story and agency in shaping events. Different times and places such as ‘eternal’ jailoos and Soviet dams are often collapsed as people derive personal authority from connections to them. Analysing accounts of collectivization and privatization I argue that the Soviet period is often treated as a ‘second tradition’ used to judge the present. People also strive for ‘the good life’ through working practices that are closely linked to the Soviet experience, and yet differ from Marxist definitions of labour. The pervasively high value of work is fed from different, formally conflicting sources of moral authority such as Socialism, Islam and neo-liberal ideals of ‘entrepreneurship’. I discuss how parties, poetry and song bring together jakshylyk (goodness) as enjoyment and virtue. I show how song and poetry act as moral guides, how arman yearning is purposely enjoyed in Kyrgyz music and how it relates to nostalgia and nature imagery. The concept of ‘moral geography’ allows me to investigate how people strive for well-being, an investigation that is just as important as focusing on problem-solving and avoiding pain. It also allows an analysis of place and time that holds material interactions, moral ideals, economic and political dimensions in mind.

By examining Renaissance criticism both literary and musical, framed in the context of the contemporaneous obsession with the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, among others, this thesis identifies the parallels in poetic and musical practices of the time that coalesce to form a unified idea about the poet-as-singer, and his role in society. Edmund Spenser and John Milton, who both, in various ways, lived in periods of upheaval, identified themselves as the poet-singer, and comprehending their poetry in the context of this idea is essential to a fuller appreciation thereof. The first chapter addresses the role that the study of rhetoric and the power of oratory played in shaping attitudes about poetry, and how the importance of sound, of an innate musicality to poetry, was pivotal in the turn from quantitative to accentual-syllabic verse. In addition, the philosophical idea of music, inherited from antiquity, is explained in order elucidate the significance of “artifice” and “proportion”. With this as a backdrop, the chapters following examine first the work of Spenser, and then of Milton, demonstrating the central role that music played in the composition of their verse. Also significant, in the case of Milton, is the revolution undertaken by the Florentine Camerata around the turn of the seventeenth century, which culminated in the birth of opera. The sources employed by this group of scholars and artists are identical to those which shaped the idea of the poet-as-singer, and analysing their works in tandem yields new insights into those poems which are considered among the finest achievements in English literature.