Presentation Of Cultural Identity And Identity Construction Of The Black In Jazz From The Perspective Of Stylistic Deviation

Toni Morrison, the only African-American female Nobel Prize Winner, has beendedicating herself to preserving and carrying forward the black culture and alwaysundertaking the task of showing and exploring the blacks’ history, destiny andpsychological world. Jazz is her sixth masterpiece, and this novel has vividlyrecreated another essential aspect of American reality—the African-American groupin American society. The purpose and implication of this thesis is to show us a vividpicture of African-American people, especially the tough development process ofthose black groups’ cultural identity and identity construction by means of analyzingthe linguistic features and stylistic features of the text.This thesis takes the lexical deviation, semantic deviation, grammatical deviationand written deviation as a starting point, profoundly discusses the strong desires forobtaining cultural identity and establishing identity constructions of the blackindividuals and groups, implying the hardships of their survival and indicating anunlimited pursuit to national cultural identities. The writer adopts the research methodof qualitative analysis, and selects all the linguistic corpuses from the Jazz. In thisnovel, the relationship between characters is rather complicated, the plot is intricateand the linguistic expressive force is extremely strong. By analyzing the narrativediscourse, dialogues, interior monologue in characters, studying the vocabulary usedby the blacks and the grammatical structure and linguistic form, we have not onlyobserved linguistic features of the blacks and its unique charm, but also noticed thepresent life condition of the blacks and their puzzles to the cultural identities andidentity constructions which are reflected by language shells. With Jazz as thestudying object, making use of relative theory in stylistics to analyze the problem ofcultural identity and identity construction is feasible and persuasive.Under the strong erosion of the white mainstream culture, the blacks have nostatus, have no rights to speak, let alone construct their own cultural identities. Basedon the research of the Jazz, some major findings have been found by the writer. First, a great number of stylistic and linguistic deviation phenomena appear in the text.Second, two possible solutions for solving the black identity problems have beensuggested by the writer. If the black individuals or groups want to obtain culturalidentities and establish their identity constructions, they must on the one hand insiston development of their national traditional culture, with unique jazz spirit as itsessence. On the other hand, they must insist on development of the black communities,on continuous pursuit and struggles of the blacks themselves. The black communitiesare the fountain of national culture and national strength, away from it means one outof the harmonious affection and love, out of the black culture foundations.