Fascinating rhythm: Reading jazz in American writing.

Title: Fascinating rhythm: Reading jazz in American writing.
Identifier: AAI3170000
identifier: 3170000
Creator: Yaffe, David.
Contributor: Adviser: Wayne Koestenbaum
Date: 2005
Language: English
Publisher: City University of New York.
Subject: Literature, American | American Studies | Music | Black Studies
Abstract: Fascinating Rhythm is about jazz musicians and the themes American writers have garnered from them. It is an interdisciplinary work of literary and music scholarship, the result of formal literary training and beat reporting on the jazz scene. The book explores how Jewish novelists such as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and Philip Roth engaged issues of racial, ethnic, and American authenticity by way of jazz; how Ralph Ellison's description of a Louis Armstrong record in Invisible Man led to a neoconservative movement in contemporary jazz; how poets such as Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, and Frank O'Hara were variously inspired by the music; and how memoirs by Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis both reinforced and redeemed jazz's red-light origins. The book confronts the current jazz discourse and shows how poets and novelists can be placed in it---often with problematic results. Fascinating Rhythm stops to listen for the music, demonstrating how jazz continues to speak for the American writer.
Type: dissertation
Source: PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
degree: Ph.D.