Politicizing Poetics, Narrative Syncopations, and Jazz Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century American Literary Discours

This project argues that Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Melvin Tolson, and Albert Murray develop a jazz aesthetic to politically engage with a mid-century literal critical discourse dismissive of African American writers. These authors syncopate narrative convention, challenge literary form, and embrace jazz ideologies to confront misperceptions of African American culture and jazz. Ellison, Brooks, Tolson, and Murray confront a critical elitism embedded within mid-century transatlantic publications that employ jazz terminology to reinforce aesthetic hierarchies that marginalize African American modes of cultural production. The authors discussed in this study form a subversive jazz aesthetic that allows musicians, writers, and other artists to confront and subvert discursive formations that categorize jazz as spontaneous primitivity and inferior to traditional Anglo-European musical, literary, and poetic forms. Ellison, Brooks, Tolson, and Murray utilize jazz rhythms, ideologies, and language to reclaim jazz as a legitimate cultural art form, and their use of jazz aesthetics politicizes their work, expands the growing jazz tradition, and argues for a re-conception of their place within twentieth-century African American and American literary discourse.;Jazz acts as a democratizing force and embodies a metaphorical representation of American democratic ideals while jazz aesthetics provides discursive power and agency to previously marginalized voices. Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man is contextualized in his work previously published in little magazines to position his text as a political refutation of an American mid-century critical elitism disparaging of jazz and African American culture. Gwendolyn Brooks's early 1940's work in Poetry is shown to be a subversion of critical norms promoted by the magazine, while her A Street in Bronzeville promotes the construction of identity through an absorption of form and integration of jazz ideologies. Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery is examined as a rejection of a dominant critical elitism through its incorporation of jazz figures and insistence on African and African American cultural forms. Albert Murray's non-fiction work contributes to the cultural legitimacy of blues and jazz culture, and his novel Train Whistle Guitar offers a literary embodiment of an adaptive blues idiom necessary to navigate twentieth-century socio-economic and racial obstacles. These authors expand current understandings of jazz and its relationship to literature, and employ jazz aesthetics that confronts, challenges, and combats oppressive literary environments that marginalize African American literature, authors, and jazz.