Fascinating Rhythm

[Dave Monroe]

Yaffe, David.  Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in
American Writing.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005.

How have American writers written about jazz, and how
has jazz influenced American literature? In
Fascinating Rhythm, David Yaffe explores the
relationship and interplay between jazz and
literature, looking at jazz musicians and the themes
literature has garnered from them by appropriating the
style, tones, and innovations of jazz, and
demonstrating that the poetics of jazz has both been
assimilated into, and deeply affected, the development
of twentieth-century American literature.

Yaffe 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 descriptions of Louis
Armstrong 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 the red light origins of jazz.
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 write

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8062.html

"Introduction"

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i8062.pdf

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i8062.html

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com