The Black Aesthetics Of Jazz

Toni Morrison, the winner of Nobel Prize for literature, is a creative stylist whose works demonstrate consistent concern for the beauty of language and a new definition for African-American writing. The chosen text is Toni Morrison's Jazz, which is typical of her unique narrative style. Jazz is written against a background of Harlem Renaissance and the great migration to the north. Following the thematic cue of her previous novels, Toni Morrison continues to explore the cultural and historic tradition of the African-American blacks. This essay, by analyzing the jazz-like narration, argues that the meaning and the identity is a dialogic construction and the self is always a subject-in-process, and at the same time, challenges the western metaphysics:"reason and rational"as well as the western narrative tradition with a view to recuperating the African-American culture and history.The thesis consists of four parts: The first chapter gives a general survey of the reviews on the novel-Jazz and then a brief layout of the thesis. The second chapter is devoted to the analysis of the language of the novel. I argue that the language of the novel resembles the jazz music. Morrison has gradually (by writing the first four novels) taken the language she inherited her very own, then transformed it into a powerful instrument that could play her music. She made the black vernacular blend harmoniously with the Standard English. The third chapter mainly studies the structure of the novel under the jazz music frame. There exists a comparison between the music and the novel. Since jazz music is famous for its improvisation, the interplay between narrator, characters, reader and author is omnipresent in the text. Chapter four draws a conclusion of what I argue in the preceding chapters. I contend that through the unique language and narrative strategy, Morrison wants the reader to have a better understanding of the history and the culture of the African-American blacks and to maintain that the identity is a dialogic process.