Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (2006)
This book looks at the influence of jazz on the development of African American modernist literature over the 20th century, with a particular attention to the social and aesthetic significance of stylistic changes in the music.
ISBN 9780415804004
268 pages
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Winner of the 2008 Texas Tech President’s Book Award for Outstanding Faculty Publication.
Jazz and American Culture (2024)
Almost immediately after jazz became popular nationally in the United States in the early 20th century, American writers responded to what this exciting art form signified for listeners. This book takes an expansive view of the relationship between this uniquely American music and other aspects of American life, including books, films, language, and politics. Observing how jazz has become a cultural institution, widely celebrated as 'America's classical music, ' the book also never loses sight of its beginnings in Black expressive culture and its enduring ability to critique problems of democracy or speak back to violence and inequality, from Jim Crow to George Floyd. Taking the reader through time and across expressive forms, this volume traces jazz as an aesthetic influence, a political force, and a representational focus in American literature and culture. It shows how Jazz has long been a rich source of aesthetic stimulation, influencing writers as stylistically wide-ranging as Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, and James Baldwin, or artists as diverse as Aaron Douglas, Jackson Pollock, and Gordon Parks.
ISBN 9781009420198
400 pages
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Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature
Jazz and American Culture
reviews
“Swinging the Vernacular is the best introduction of jazz for literary scholars yet. Borshuk defines his terms clearly—including “vernacular”and “modernism,” and how jazz practices fit both terms—and his integration of text, theory, music, and history makes it an ideal text for graduate seminars.” — Joel Dinerstein, American Literature
“This study contributes as much to cultural history as to literary criticism. Without neglecting [Langston Hughes’s] enduring commitment to ethnic culture and identity, and without denying that he is of course a major black modernist, Swinging the Vernacular insists on Hughes’s status as an American writer. This is a welcome and reasonable claim.” —Mathew Hofer, American Literary Scholarship
reviews
“Borshuk’s collection of 22 uniformly excellent essays is evidence of how vibrant, multifaceted, and productive the field of ‘new jazz studies’ has been. . . . Jazz history may be an ‘unruly set of musical developments’ (p. 1) but Borshuk and company bring just the right amount of order to it. Highly recommended.” —E.A. Atkins, Choice
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2024
‘In this elegant, bold, ambitious, and much-needed intervention in the standard histories of Jazz, Borshuk brings together an all-star cast of leading scholars on a comprehensive set of topics that together enable us all to make a great leap forward in understanding the music’s essential relation to American culture. The book begins with several insightful discussions of the specific aesthetic features that define jazz in the context of improvisation, race, literature, and performance, then situates the music historically in terms of Harlem, Modernism, and the watershed upheaval that peaked in 1968; from there, it connects jazz to American vernacular, the personal style of “cool,” and the music’s eventual and always fraught relations with institutions of various kinds, its representation in poetry, autobiography, liner notes, and in the visual realm from cinema to TV to photography. An invaluable resource, a stunning achievement.’ — T. R. Johnson, Tulane University, author of New Orleans: A Writer’s City