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

这个项目将探讨爵士乐和蓝调在盖尔·琼斯的工作，寻求准确地辨别琼斯如何翻译或转录音乐技巧到文学的，并使她的书面文本明显口头。我的中心研究将是解读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，我将探讨他们如何促进心理创伤的恢复，维护个人，国家和种族身份，并吸收和面对现代美国奴隶制的持久遗产和残留痕迹。通过这种方式，该项目将采用一种方法，努力联合收割机的形式和内容的研究相结合，面对琼斯的主题关注和政治，所以往往被视为有问题的，通过调查他们是如何表达她的音乐技巧。该项目将在非裔美国人的民间传说和讲故事的传统，以及女性蓝调歌手的背景下，琼斯的口述。我将讨论她的作品如何与这些背景的参与体现了琼斯在黑人艺术运动的参与。她的口头力学也将被调查;探索琼斯如何确切地使她的文本听到和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和政治功能，他们为她的文本。例如，琼斯的切分音，她的作品中独奏和合奏之间的紧张关系，她的沉默，重复，和蓝色音符的使用都将被检查。本研究试图通过关注一个被忽视的作者的工作来纠正不平衡。它将考虑到她的全部作品，包括她后来的小说和诗集，这些都受到了惊人的关注，以及她新发行的六卷本《帕尔马》。在考虑琼斯的音乐技巧，这个项目将承认和调查琼斯的创新和实验性的正式技能，已被纳入批判性的关注，往往是敌对的，她的工作的主题内容。随着最近琼斯的一些小说的重新出版，这个项目将有望扩大一个显著的听觉，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.