The thesis explores the presence of jazz in the novel Jazz by African American female writer Toni Morrison. Based on the ideas of various authors (Williams, Frith, Hobsbawm, Jones, Gilroy) we define jazz as a musical and cultural form that represents a means of identification for African Americans. We analyse the context of the novel – the time and place of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural formation of the 1920s and 1930s that marked the artistic and cultural flowering of the "black" community and is also constitutive of later African American cultural production – in a sociological-comparativist way. We particularly highlight the emergence of jazz in this era and its thematisation in the novel (City as a jazz space, the Harlem night scene, »house rent parties«, »race records«). We also analyze the jazz narrative technique of the novel – the jazz elements in novel's style (jazz words and images, blues mode, inserted songs, call-and-response technique, syncopated rhythm, internal rhymes and jazz riffs) and the novel's jazz-like structure, comparing it to jazz improvisation.
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