Conducting readings of (principally) James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zoral Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed, Omry (jazz and American literature, Tel
Aviv U., Israel) variously adopts blues, bebop, modal jazz, and free jazz as models through which to draw analogies to and thereby understand their different aesthetic approaches to
constructing ethnic identity within their writings. Adopting theoretical insights from Theodor Adorno's writings on western music (even though Adorno was hostile to jazz), he presents four
chapters that apply a blues lens to understanding the linguistic components of the racialized discourse of Hughes, Hurston, and Jones; consider how the performativity of bebop is related to the
performative discourse of Ellison, Baldwin, and Morrison; examine the structures of modal jazz as interpretive devices for conceptions of ethnic identity in Reed and Morrison; and compares how
free jazz's assault on musical norms and confines compares with Morrison's refusal to submit to the linguistic confines of construed racialism in "Recitatif" and the novel Paradise. Annotation
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