The novel in the time of jazz: Race and temporality in the teens and twenties.

摘要

The present dissertation examines the constellation formed by the novel, jazz, temporality, and race in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. In focusing on the way that American society reconfigured itself in this period, it undertakes a genealogy of the role that race and the production and dissemination of African American musical forms play in the economy of the American cultural imagination.; This dissertation foregrounds the racial implications of questions of temporality; its analyses of novelistic and jazz temporality are also analyses of the impact of ideologies of race on the production and conception of aesthetic works, and on the poesis of culture itself. To this end, it understands jazz and the novel not as inhabitants of distinct cultural realms, but as rival interlocutors in debates over the proper shape of American culture. The juxtaposition of jazz recordings with American novels is an articulation of the former's emphasis on surprise and the unexpected with the latter's vexed relationship to the early nineteenth century temporal conceptions latent in novelistic form, and an attempt to open the questions of race, time, and aesthetic form in new directions.; Moving away from an approach that looks primarily at representations of jazz, this dissertation focuses on the music itself, coupling readings of recordings by James P. Johnson and Bessie Smith with readings of James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It then concludes with a survey of six quite different American novels, novels whose wide divergence in style, form, and construction of aesthetic purpose speaks to the broad relevance of the socio-aesthetic constellation under examination. The combination of narratological analyses of the way novels shape time with formal analyses of jazz's treatment of rhythm and repetition highlights the intimate connection between the two forms; the result is a radically altered understanding of these novels, of the role of jazz in American culture, and of the crucial function of temporal and racial ideologies in the movement by which American society adapted itself to the demands of the twentieth century.