Mapping the Postmodern in Toni Morrison's "Jazz"

Essay from the year 2020 in the subject African Studies - Literature, grade: 14/20, Sultan Moulay Sliman University, language: English, abstract: This paper comes as an answer to the question of what does jazz mean in Toni Morrison¿s novel "Jazz". It is an attempt to dismantle those literary techniques used by Morrison, which derives from the music of jazz. It also tries to trace some postmodern literary elements such as metafiction, the unreliability of the narrator, intertexuality, and the rewriting of history. Jazz and postmodernism are interrelated terms since many postmodern writers especially those of the Beat Generation for instance rely on the rhizomatic improvisation of jazz during the process of writing.

The moment someone glances at the title of Jazz on Morrison novel, he/she wonders what is jazzy about it. After Jazz came into being in 1992, one year later, Morrison was the first African American laureate of Nobel Prize for literature. The novel of Jazz is probably the reason why critics and readers as well lingered at works such as Beloved, Song of Solomon, Sula and The Bluest Eye and thus reconsidered the literary heritage of Toni Morrison. "Jazz" is the second novel in the trilogy of Morrison, which includes Beloved and Paradise. Morrison did not consider them as a trilogy. Yet, the fact that they bring some historical moments such slavery, Reconstruction and Civil Wars from the past into the African American memory makes critics perceive them as the same.