Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Morrison, Toni – Jazz'

This essay examines the subject-object dichotomy between men and women in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the thesis of the essay is that this dichotomy develops into subject-object harmony. Through Simone de Beauvoir’s theory regarding the subject-object dichotomy and a close reading of the novel, this essay concludes that Jazz shows the possibility of reciprocal relationships built on friendship. In other words, the dichotomy changes into harmony, which makes it possible for both men and women to reach freedom and fulfilment in transcendence.

This paper deals with the novel Jazz, written by African-American writer Toni Morrison. The paper argues that the novel deconstructs itself. Also, it illustrates how the jazz music in the novel works as a deconstructing force on the characters and the narrative form. The essay begins with a chapter about deconstructive theory.  Next, there is a brief summary of jazz music – its history and features. Then, there is an analysis which focuses on how jazz music affects the characters. Last, the narrative form is investigated, for instance in terms of the narrator’s tendency to shift between various points of view.
Uppsatsen påbörjades vid Halmstad Högskola med Cecilia Björkén Nyberg som handledare, men slutfördes vid Växjö Universitet. Magisterexamen är sedan uttagen vid Högskolan i Halmstad.

From fourteenth century medieval literature to contemporary American and African American literature, researchers have singled out and analyzed writing from every genre that is prophetic in nature, predicting or warning about events, both revolutionary and dire, to come. One twentieth-century American whose work embodies the essence of warning and foretelling through history-laden literature is Toni Morrison. This modern-day literary prophet reinterprets eras gone by through what she calls “re-memory” in order to guide her readers, and her society, to a greater understanding of the consequences of slavery and racism in America and to prompt both races to escape the pernicious effects of this heritage. Several critics have recognized and written about Morrison’s unique style of prophetic prose. These critics, however, have either taken a general cursory analysis of her complete body of works or they are only focused on one of her texts as a site of evidence. Despite the many critical essays and journal articles that have been written about Morrison as literary prophet, no critic has extensively investigated Morrison’s major works by way of textual analysis under this subject, to discuss Morrison prophetic prose, her motivation for engaging in a form of prophetic writing, and the context of this writing in a wider general, as well as an African-American, tradition. This dissertation takes on a more comprehensive, cross-sectional analysis of her works that has been previously employed, concentrating on five of Morrison’s major novels: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, in an order to assess how Morrison develops and infuses warnings and admonitions of biblical proportions. This investigation seeks to reveal Morrison’s motivation to prophecy to Americans, black and white, the context in which she engages with her historical and contemporary subjects, and the nature of the admonitions to present and future action she offers to what she sees as a contemporary generation of socially and historically oblivious African Americans, using literary prophecy as the tool by which to accomplish her objectives. This dissertation also demonstrates—by way of textual analysis and literary theory—the evolution through five novels of Morrison’s development as a literary prophet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006.
Title from title screen. Audrey Goodman, committee chair; Pearl Mchaney, Christopher Kocela, committee members. Electronic text (99 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 25, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-99).

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La presente Tesis parte de un acercamiento poliédrico al blues y al jazz como temas literarios, como ritmos transgresores, como espacios de reivindicación y como estandartes de la música que surgió del contacto cultural en la diáspora. Se explora La influencia de estos géneros musicales en tres obras literarias de cada una las siguientes autoras: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker y Gayl Jones. Estos textos literarios, publicados principalmente entre los años setenta y principios de los ochenta del siglo XX, son uma buena muestra de la influencia del legado de las cantantes de blues, de los ritmos sincopados del jazz y de la cultura vernácula de las personas afro-estadounidenses. Las escritoras rompen con la tradición literaria de vincular el blues y el jazz a autores masculinos y protagonizan el renacer literario femenino negro de los años setenta. Esta investigación aúna la crítica feminista negra, los estudios literarios y lãs historias de la música negra, para determinar el papel del blues y el jazz como testimonios de la resistencia ante la desigualdad de raza, clase y género, esta última visibilizada por las cantantes de blues primero y por las autoras objeto de estúdio después. Asimismo, se hace especial énfasis en el trasfondo social de la música que sonaba en el momento histórico en el que las autoras sitúan la trama de los textos.

Denne avhandlingen er en studie av hvordan Toni Morrisons Jazz (1992) skiller seg fra tidligere storbyromaner, ved å bryte med den tragiske desillusjonsmodellen, og ved å ha et sterkt fokus på den auditive, polyfone fortellerteknikken. Jazz skildrer afroamerikanernes nye liv i det urbane nord på 1920-tallet, etter «the Great Migration». De befinner seg her på et nullpunkt i historien. De har beveget seg bort fra diskrimineringen i sør, og flyttet til Harlem i nord i en søken etter flere rettigheter og et bedre liv. Romanens hovedmotiv er om ekteparet Joe og Violet, og Joes unge elskerinne, Dorcas. Joe dreper Dorcas da hun forlater ham for en annen. Violet forsøker å hevne seg ved å knivstikke den allerede døde Dorcas i begravelsen. Resten av romanen skildrer perioden frem til drapet, og perioden etter, fra de ulike karakterenes perspektiv. Jeg har valgt å fokusere på fortellerens ulike nivåer, og hennes kamp med karakterene som ønsker å fortelle sine egne historier. Jeg ser også på romanens inspirasjon fra musikkgenrene blues og jazz. Romankarakterene lever et bluesy liv, preget av utroskap, drap og hevnlyst. Og romanformen er som en jazzinspirert komposisjon, der karakterene improviserer over romanens hovedmotiv. Dette innebærer blant annet at romanens form er varierende, repetitiv og leker med temposkifter. Romanens polyfone form gjør at karakterene etter hvert kommer på samme narrative nivå som fortelleren, og de har en pågående dialog mellom seg. Dette resulterer i at romanhandlingen skildres ut fra en desentrert fortellerstemme, som ikke kan kobles tilbake til én forteller, men flere likeverdige. Jeg har valgt å dele avhandlingen opp i tre hovedkapitler: «Byen i litteraturen. Fra eldre til moderne tid», «Jazz og Harlemrenessansen» og «The City». «Byen i litteraturen» tar for seg en kort oversikt over romanens fortellertekniske utvikling fra 1700-tallet til den modernistiske romanen på 1900-tallet. Kapittelet ser på hvordan fortellerteknikkene som utviklet seg i denne perioden, var inspirert av komposisjonsteknikker som har en tydelig visuell, optisk representasjonslogikk. Disse teknikkene ble brukt for å skape et slags sentralisert mangfold. «Jazz og Harlemrenessansen» ser på hvordan Morrison bryter med disse tidligere sentraliserte, litterære formprinsipper, ved å bruke en desentrert fortellerstemme og flere ulike perspektiv. I dette kapittelet ser jeg også på bluesens og jazzens påvirkning på romanens tematikk og form. «The City» har et større fokus på karakterenes improvisasjon over romanens hovedmotiv. Og hvordan jazzens form hjelper til med å bryte med bluesens livspessimistiske stemning, og dermed desillusjonsmodellen som tidligere forfattere brukte i sine storbyromaner.

Les concepts de littérature et de musique ont toujours été liés depuis l'antiquité grecque. En effet, cette relation est le fruit de plusieurs affinités d'ordre esthétique qui les coordonnent dans la mesure où l’un structure et l’autre matérialise les données à exposer. Autrement dit, la littérature a toujours servi de structure ou de support au XX ème pour dire les phénomènes de langage qui incluent la mathématique, l’informatique et bien d’autres domaines. Aussi, l’esthétique musicale comportant essentiellement les codes rythmiques notamment les figures de silence, les codes acoustiques (notes de musique, instruments de musique), la fréquence des notes, leur hauteur et surtout leur amplitude; sous la forme musicale de la structure narrative, c’est-à-dire une articulation sémantique et discursive des mots et expressions qui cachent en réalité les codes de l’esthétique musicale se révèle une sorte de débordement de la diégèse....C'(est donc ce travail de correspondanc entre la discontinuité sémantique et discursive du texte du XXème siècle (contaminé par les codes de musique) et la constitution d'une partition musicale qui nous aidera à mieux cerner le lien entre littérature et musique... Notre étude prendra à cet effet appui sur quatre oeuvres : Tous les matins du monde de Pascal Quignard, Ritournelle de la faim de J.M G le Clézio, Les ruines de Paris de Jacques Réda et Jazz de Toni Morrison
Since ancient Greece, the music and literature concepts have always been linked. In fact, this relationship had started from the consequence of several aesthetic affinities that coordinate as much as one structure and one materializes the data to expose. In other words, literature has always served as a structure or support the twentieth century to say the language phenomena including mathematics, data processing and many other fields. Also, the musical aesthetics essentially containing the rhythmic codes including “figures de silence”, acoustic codes (music notes, musical instruments), the frequency of notes, especially their height and amplitude; under the musical form of the narrative structure that’s mean, semantic and discursive articulation of words and phrases that actually conceal codes music, reveals a kind of overflow of the literary text.....So, this work of correspondence between the semantic and discursive discontinuity text of the twentieh century (contaminated by the codes of music) and the creation of a musical game that will help us better understand the link between literature and music.... Our study supports on four works (books) : All the Mornings of the World Easter Quignar Ritournelle Hunger the JMG Le Clezio, The ruins of Paris Jacques Reda and Jazz bu Toni Morrison

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Secrets and silence appear frequently in the work of Toni Morrison. In three novels, The Bluest Eye, Jazz, and Paradise, she repeats a specific phrase that acts as a signal to the reader. Morrison three times writes, “Quiet as it’s kept” in her novels to alert readers to the particular significance secrets and silence play in these novels. Morrison portrays this secrecy and silence as a barrier to building strong communities and even a strong self-identity. While the phrase appears in the same form, with each subsequent appearance, Morrison takes the idea a step further. In each novel she demonstrates how breaking the silence and refusing to keep quiet is an act of healing or salvation and she expands this healing to be increasingly inclusive. What begins as a single voice breaking the silence in The Bluest Eye becomes a group of people sharing their secrets in Jazz, and finally an entire town coming to terms with the power of speaking up. This thesis looks at the secrets and their impact on characters in each novel and explores the progression of the power in refusing to keep quiet.

The cultural and historical construction of African American identity in the United States has been closely tied to the dialectical relationship formed between sound and silence. This thesis examines the modernist and postmodernist representation of sound and silence in the African American novels Passing (1929), by Nella Larsen, and Jazz (1992), by Toni Morrison, as indicators of African American identity and racial oppression during the Harlem Renaissance. I analyze the soundscapes of both texts to expose the mobility of language, power, and space, especially as these soundscapes relate to the production of sound (both musical and non-musical) by African Americans, and the surveillance of these sounds by white audiences. Through my analysis of repetitive sound-images and embodied silence in Passing and Jazz, as well as textual representations of oral performance, I argue that there is harm in restricting African American voices to approved modes of audibility and/or limiting African American voices to one a singular narrative. This thesis introduces critics and theories from the disciplines of sound studies and African American studies, and applies the widely known theory of double consciousness, established by critic and author W.E.B. Du Bois, as the foundation for my literary and cultural analysis of sound in print.
Graduation date: 2013

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2003.
Advisor: Dr. Maxine Montgomery, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 9, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

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.

碩士
國立臺灣師範大學
英語學系
97
This thesis studies the manifold connections between jazz and Toni Morrison’s Jazz and thereby explores how Jazz jazzes up black identity through repetition and differences. Examining the hybrid implications and performative nature of jazz, Chapter One attempts to justify my reading of Jazz as a manifestation of indefinite black identities. In this way, I attest Morrison’s employment of jazz to her non-essentialist attitude toward blackness. Chapter Two draws on riffs in jazz to explicate how the devices of repetition help improvise the meanings of identity in Jazz. In my view, recurring motifs and repetitive rhythms contribute to variegating a theme in different contexts and engender various interpretations of one’s identity through différance. Chapter Three investigates how Jazz transforms biblical stories into an African American jazz song, in which the characters, the narrator, and the reader are free to improvise the meaning of their identities. Through a juxtaposed reading of Jazz and the Bible, I wish to examine how Jazz, in rewriting certain biblical scenes, motivates the construction of black identity. All in all, I elaborate on how the characters in Jazz, like jazz performers, experience a process of identification and plays out their identities in a mobile way. Analyzing repetition and différance in Jazz, I interpret black identity as a repeatable category through performance. As a hybrid product, Jazz allows itself to be remade into différancial forms, and thus continues to jazz up new interpretations of black identity in the various contexts the novel is, and will be, grafted into.

碩士
國立中正大學
外國文學所
97
This thesis aims to examine African Americans’ racial amnesia and trauma recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jazz. Chapter One briefly introduces Cathy Caruth’s and Judith Lewis Herman’s trauma theory and discusses related critical essays on Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992). Chapter Two aims to discuss racial amnesia and traumatic haunting in Beloved. The first part of Chapter Two focuses on characters’ racial amnesia in the beginning of Beloved and examines how their past trauma is repressed and ignored. The second part of Chapter Two shows the impact of characters’ traumatic haunting. Characters in Beloved are forced to face their trauma and even to fight against their traumatic past. Through the bond of community, characters bring changes into their life even though their trauma may continue to haunt their life. Chapter Three discusses trauma recovery and self reconstruction in Jazz. In the former part of the chapter, Herman’s theory of trauma recovery is applied to discuss how trauma in Beloved and Jazz is healed. Through recalling their traumatic past, characters can find out chances to be reconnected with society and to recover from their trauma. The later part of the chapter aims to point out the necessity for characters to build up their self so that they can maintain a stable relationship with other characters and start a new life. Through Beloved and Jazz, Morrison points out the possibility of trauma recovery for African Americans.

碩士
國立臺灣師範大學
英語學系
105
In this thesis, I will focus on Jazz and Home to examine black masculinity developed in the relationships with women, spouses, and siblings through men’s interactions with women. In Jazz, Joe’s masculinity is shown to be re-formed with the help of his lovers in the structure of jazz music. In Home, Frank’s masculinity is re-formed due to his sister’s consoling.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
外國語文學系研究所
91
Jazz is a novel that demonstrates Toni Morrison’s meditations on the historical, social, and cultural event of the Great Migration in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. Set in the 1926, the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, however, the narrative of Jazz seldom refers to blacks’ artistic and cultural achievements of the time and instead focuses on the ordinary lives of its black characters, who migrate to Harlem in pursuit of better conditions. Through the depiction of the characters’spiritual and marital crises, Morrison’s Jazz probes into the impacts of this geographical relocation on African American lives. In the novel, Morrison portrays the Great Migration as a time of rupture and suggests the need of historical and cultural (re)connection for her black characters to resituate themselves in the North. Therefore, this thesis deals with the process from rupture to reconnection in the lives of the characters in Jazz. The first chapter will explore the migration to the Northern cities by examining Morrison’s representation of the urban setting of Harlem that is marked by discontinuity in history and culture. The second chapter will proceed to discuss the function of memory in helping Morrison’s characters to attain a connection with their pasts while the third chapter will focus on the rediscovery of the characters’voices, which facilitates their communication and connection with each other.

碩士
國立彰化師範大學
英語學系
92
Abstract This thesis will be mainly grounded on Bakhtin’s concepts of“polyphony” and “Architectonics of Answerability” with the purpose of unveiling the subversiveness implicated in Toni Morrison’s Jazz. The African-Americans have been situated in a racist society, being acutely marginalized and oppressed by the white people. In fact, the dominant ideologies have arbitrarily shaped their subjectivity and externally defined them. By erasing and restraining the African-American culture and history, the white dominant group further consolidates the power structure and maintains their position of dominion. Thus, for most African American writers, they write to critique and challenge the dominant white discourses. Undoubtedly, Toni Morrison’s works are also rich in the implications of subversiveness. This thesis consists of five main chapters. The first chapter contains six parts. First of all, I will briefly review the plot of Jazz. Second, I will introduce the historical background of this novel. Third, I will state the oral traditions of African-American culture, particularly the music pattern of jazz, and then figure out how jazz elements have been incorporated into Jazz. The fourth part is the critical review, which includes three main tendencies: the Derridean readings, music-literature readings, and the feminist readings. Fifth, I will compare Morrison’s views of language and those of Bakhtin’s, further justifying my using Bakhtin’s theories in this thesis. At last, I will offer an introduction to the structure of this thesis. In chapter two, the major Bakhtinian conceptions will be clarified. First, I will manifest his dialogical views about language. Then, I will explain other related terms, like the double-voiced discourse, the tension between centripetal/centrifugal forces, the image of language, character zone, parody and heteroglossia. In addition, Bakhtin’s key ideas about self-other formulation─surplus of vision, outsideness, transgredience─will be evinced. In the third chapter, I attempt to interpret Jazz as a polyphonic novel, which is featured with the equation of author and characters, the interaction among diverse voices and consciousnesses, and the textual unfinalization. First, through the exploration of the innovated narrator/character/reader relationship, I will draw in the notion of the equation of author and characters represented in a polyphonic novel. Second, I will penetrate the surface of language and find out the ideological confrontation between the centripetal and centrifugal forces by focusing on the characters’ discourses, generic fusion, parodic devices in the text. Third, I will manifest the textual open-endness of Jazz. At last, the political implication of this novel will be evinced. In chapter four, I intend to analyze how the characters reconstruct their self-identity through dialogizing with others, subverting the externally defined “selves”, and repossess their subjectivity. First, I will state why the main characters suffer from psychological displacements and sense of loss, indicating their inner reality of contradiction and the unreconciled double-consciousness. Second, I will succinctly explicate the “intersubjectivity” proposed by Bakhtin and its relation to the concept of community. Third, I attempt to investigate how the main characters in Jazz construct an authentic self-identity through dialogizing with other people. According to Bakhtin, each one assumes a position of “outsideness” and possesses “surplus of vision” in relation to the other. When one and the other exchange their mutual “surplus,” they will be capable of establish a viable self-identity and form a kind of “intersubjectivity”. In the concluding chapter, I will recapitulate the preceding chapters, and then, offer suggestions for further studies on this novel.