559 G SEMINAR AFRO-AMERICAN LIT, Maxwell. M 3-4:50
TOPIC: The Jazz Page: Modern Black Music and American Literary Modernism
This seminar will explore how key makers and modes of American modernist literature responded to jazz—the music Ralph Ellison dubbed the African-American “art of individual assertion within and against the group.” Do the lower frequencies of T. S. Eliot’s high modernist monument “The Waste Land” channel Louis Armstrong’s allusive, syncopated cornet? Was Duke Ellington the foremost Renaissance man of Harlem ’s cultural renaissance? When all is said and heard, is jazz the maestro most responsible for rousing a distinctly U.S. modernism? We’ll address such questions in pursuit of two major revisionist agendas: namely, (1) measuring the way in which the New Jazz Studies has productively unsettled assumptions about the representational, ideological, and formal habits of African-American writing; and (2) revisiting the interracial construction of American modernist writing in general by way of a music that celebrates both “cutting contests” and collegial improvisation. Our syllabus will mix poems, stories, and (short) novels by a host of consequential black and white American authors, including James Baldwin, Rita Dove, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, and Eudora Welty; musical memoirs by Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday; essays in literary criticism, cultural studies, and the old and new musicology by Theodor Adorno, Amiri Baraka, Hazel Carby, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Norman Mailer, Albert Murray, and John F. Szwed; and an on-line soundtrack of classic jazz recordings. Musically trained or fan-based knowledge of jazz is welcome, but is neither assumed nor necessary. Course requirements will entail several short reading response papers, one in-class presentation, and an article-length final essay.