Jazz and Blues Sessions in American Literature
Session Organizer: Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure
Department of English Language and Literature, University of Northern Iowa
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0502
Pierre.Mvuyekure@uni.edu

Narrating Trauma through Blues in Eva’s Man

Gayl Jones has written about the blues in African American literature, and her novels Corregidora and Eva’s Man have been discussed as blues texts. This paper seeks to contribute to this ongoing conversation through a reading of Eva’s Man that focuses on an element that has not been widely noted: the usefulness of blues technique to the narration of traumatic experience. In Eva’s Man, blues techniques such as repetition, rhythmic variation, interruption, and chronological irregularity provide the vehicle through which the meaning of traumatic experience is expressed along with the temporal displacement such experience entails. Moreover, Jones’s use of blues discourse subverts the discourses that contain the narrator, from the psychiatrists’ discourse which attempts to define Eva, to Davis’s discourse which insists that she present what he perceives as coherent narration of her life. By the end of the novel, Eva’s blues mode of narrating traumatic experience supplants these confining discourses, as her affirmation of her sexuality in the encounter with Elvira demonstrates.

Erin A. Boade
University of Texas-Austin
eabode@mail.utexas.edu

Jazzing Jack and Be-bopping the Beat Generation: African American Vernacular Culture in Kerouac’s On the Road

This paper shows how in On the Road Jack Kerouac uses African American art, language, and music to drive the experience of life on the road and the search for transcendence. For Kerouac, the spirit of the moment is caught up in the momentum, spontaneity, and creativity found in Jazz and Be-bop. What Kerouac hopes to find is his search on the road with his friend Allen Ginsberg is the very spirit of “IT.” In On the Road, what “IT” is is never defined in concrete terms. The experience of “IT” is fleeting and can be found anywhere and in anything, but mostly, “IT” is found in the jazz clubs and Kerouac’s experiences with African American vernacular culture. Overall, the paper will address the following features: the spontaneous movement and travel of the novel, the way Jazz drives the development, characterization and plot, the various references and significance of African American artists, the way in which this novel differs from a blues novel, the use of black vernacular and adaptations of African American speech, the representation and depiction of black characters throughout the text, just to name a few.

Lorraine Stamp
University of Northern Iowa
stamp@uni.edu

‘Playing that Jazz’ in Gayl Jones’s Mosquito: Being ‘able to move freely in everywhich direction'

This paper explores how in her voluminous novel Mosquito Gayl Jones emulates Jazz musicians and changes the Euro-American novel genre by improvising on and making it bear African American vernacular traditions of Jazz. This paper argues that it is Jazz aesthetic that allows Gayl Jones to make riffs on the Western novel genre not only by combining several genres (prose, poetry, drama, neo-Slave Narrative, diary writing, interview, advertisement, epistolary form) but also by “breaking rules to create a truly multiple and expansive novel of many voices.” Not only is Mosquito multigenre, but it is also multi-voiced, multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural, and multinational (many of these concepts are discussed within the pages of the novel).

Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure
University of Northern Iowa
Pierre.Mvuyekure@uni.edu