The jazz aesthetic presented in this study constitutes an open, dialogic critical approach to African-American and Afro-Caribbean literature, particularly by contemporary women writers. It attempts to bring to light and play with differences, contradictions, and irresolvabilities within and between texts. It demonstrates how that fiction constitutes an Afrocentric discourse/performance whose aim is to write/right the history of African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities and how it plays a healing function for the protagonists, the author and the participatory audience, stressing the importance of knowing one's past and learning from one's matrilineage. Using jazz's theme-and-variations mode of composition, together with call-and-response patterns, such novels achieve wholeness behind a mask of fragmentation and vibrate with the tension between oraliture and literature. To show how varied the application of the jazz aesthetic can be, I examine Toni Morrison's Jazz, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_27543 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Contributors | Lesoinne, Veronique Marie (Author), Mark, Rebecca (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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