Reading Toni Morrison's Jazz
Rewriting the Tall Tale and Playing with the Trickster in the White American and African-American Humour Traditions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8896010 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jennifer Andrews (0000-0002-5679-5565) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 87-108 |
| Publication date | 1999-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-029-01-04 |
| OpenAlex | W2021185284 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
It's like humor: You have to take the authority back; you realign where the power is." (Morrison 1994, 245) Jazz is the subject of numerous scholarly articles which explore a wide variety of topics, including how Morrison uses jazz music and its rhythms to shape her text,1 what the sex of her unnamed narrator might be,2 and how the novel depicts the daily realities of city living for those African Americans who migrated northward to Harlem during the 1920s.3 Published in 1992, Jazz is the second novel of a recently completed trilogy4 that describes the history of African Americans from slavery onward, a legacy of dispossession which has had a dramatic effect on subsequent generations. In Jazz, this search for identity is examined through the stories of Violet and Joe Trace, a couple that moves to Harlem to improve their standard of living. Abandoned by his mother at birth, Joe tries to fill this void in New York with the affections of a younger woman, Dorcas, whom he eventually murders. Using a first-person narrator, Morrison's novel provides a retrospective look at the lives of Violet, Joe, and Dorcas, and explores the events that led to her death
Aesthetics · African american · Art · Art history · Dream · Ethnology · Identity (music · Jazz · Literature · Power (physics · Subject (documents · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Trickster · White (mutation · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Humor Studies · History · Music History and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |