'The whole thing was a sort of song': Blues and Jazz in the Works of Gayl Jones

这个项目将探索盖尔·琼斯作品中的爵士乐和布鲁斯，试图准确地辨别琼斯是如何将音乐技巧翻译或转录成文学技巧的，并将她的书面文本呈现为明显的口头文本。我的中心研究问题将是破译琼斯的音乐技巧所服务的美学和政治目的。在回答这个问题时，我将探索他们如何促进心理创伤的恢复，维护个人、国家和种族身份，并吸收和应对现代美国持久的遗产和奴隶制的残余痕迹。通过这种方式，该项目将采用一种方法，努力将形式和内容的研究结合起来，通过调查琼斯的音乐技巧如何表达它们来直面琼斯的主题关切和政治，这些问题经常被认为是有问题的。该项目将在非裔美国人民间传说和讲故事的传统中，以及女性布鲁斯歌手的背景下，将琼斯的口述联系起来。我将讨论她的作品如何在这些背景下体现琼斯对黑人艺术运动的参与。她的口述技巧也将被调查；探索琼斯到底是如何让她的文本被听到的，以及她的可听文本和音乐之间的隐含关系。然后，我将详细讨论琼斯的音乐技巧，以及它们为她的文本服务的政治功能。例如，琼斯的切分，她的独唱和合奏之间的紧张关系，她的沉默，重复，以及蓝色音符的使用。这项研究试图通过关注一位被忽视的作家的作品来纠正这种不平衡。它将考虑到她的全部作品，包括她后来的小说和诗集，这些小说和诗集几乎没有受到关注，以及她新出版的六卷书《Palmares》。在考虑琼斯的音乐技巧时，这个项目将承认和调查琼斯的创新和实验性的正式技能，这些技能被归入对她作品主题内容的批判性关注，通常是敌意的。随着最近琼斯的一些小说的及时再版，该项目有望放大一个显著的听觉，但往往被忽视的声音。

This project will explore jazz and the blues in the work of Gayl Jones, seeking to discern precisely how Jones translates or transcribes musical techniques into literary ones and renders her written texts distinctly oral. My central research enquiry will be to decipher the aesthetic and political purposes Jones' musical techniques serve. In answering this, I will explore the way in which they can facilitate psychological recovery from trauma, assert individual, national, and racial identity, and absorb and confront the enduring legacy and residual traces of slavery in modern America. In this way, the project will employ a methodology that endeavours to combine the study of form and content, confronting Jones' thematic concerns and politics, so often dismissed as problematic, by investigating how they are expressed by her musical techniques. The project will contextualise Jones' orality within the traditions of both African American folklore and storytelling, and of female blues singers. I will discuss how her works' engagement with these contexts manifests Jones' participation within the Black Arts Movement. The mechanics of her orality will also be investigated; exploring how exactly Jones makes her texts heard and the implied relationship between her audible texts and music. I will then discuss Jones' musical techniques in detail and the political function they serve her texts. For example, Jones' syncopation, the tension in her work between solo voices and the ensemble, her silence, repetition, and use of the blue note will all be examined.This study seeks to redress an imbalance by attending to the work of a much-neglected author. It will take account of her entire oeuvre, including her later novels and poetry collections that have received startlingly little attention, and her newly released six volume 'Palmares'. In considering Jones' musical techniques, this project will acknowledge and investigate Jones' innovative and experimental formal skill that has been subsumed by critical attention, often hostile, to her work's thematic content. Timely with the recent republication of some of Jones' novels, the project will hopefully amplify a significantly aural, but often over-looked voice.