Drifting on a read: Jazz as a model for literary and theoretical writing.

摘要

A pun on Charlie Parker's composition "Drifting on a Reed," my title points to three questions which guided this study. First, what happens when jazz enters the discourse of this culture? Next, to what extent is jazz an effect of representation? Last, and most important, what could it mean to employ jazz as a model for writing?;To engage these questions, I examine representations of jazz in literature and film. Specifically, working from a critical posture associated with postmodern literary theory and taking Gunther Schuller's study, Early Jazz, as a departure point, I survey musicological treatments of jazz and locate four multivalent images--rhapsody, satura, obbligato, and charivari--which mark the entry of jazz into discourse. After demonstrating how these images shape the nonfiction discourse of jazz and, in turn, cultural perceptions of jazz, I show how, as enabling figures or tropes, they structure and destabilize specifically literary representations of jazz. To accomplish this task, I pair four works of critical theory with four examples of jazz fiction. The critical texts I employ are Jacques Derrida's Dissemination, John Cage's Silence, Roland Barthes's S/Z, and Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked. The fictive texts analyzed are Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, Ishmael Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers, and Martin Scorsese's film New York, New York. The purpose of this pairing is to demonstrate how the tropes of jazz can be employed as models for conceptualizing and writing critical theory.;Throughout this study I assume that acoustical patterns, if they are to be perceived and counted as music (or noise), must be mediated, and that our experience of such phenomena is necessarily constrained by modes of representation operative in a particular culture and by specific culturally sanctioned representations.