Jul 08, 2020 As far as the matter of the satire of Toni Morrison is considered, she uses this device in almost all her novels paradise”, “The Bluest Eye ”, ”Sula “,Beloved” and “Jazz”. There are many satirical elements in the novel “Jazz” and these can be categorically pointed out. Jazz - Ebook written by Toni Morrison. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read Jazz. Sep 29, 2012 Jazz is a 1992 historical novel by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American author Toni Morrison. The majority of the narrative takes place in Harlem during the 1920's; however, as the pasts of the various characters are explored, the narrative extends back to the mid-19th-century American South. Jazz is a novel by Toni Morrison that was first published in 1992. Toni Morrison’s novel, Jazz, is an experimental novel that borrows extensively from the ideas behind and the expressions of jazz music. Honoring her cultural peers from another creative genre by appropriating and adapting their techniques for her own use, Morrison creates a text that represents the hybrid of two powerfully creative.
Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz takes place during what is known as the Jazz Age, in Harlem, New York in the 1920s, as you can tell through the vivid use of language and diction. The main characters Violet and Joe, a fifty-year-old couple, suffers major strains on their relationship when Joe has an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl named Dorcas, and then ends up killing because he fears he might lose her. Even with Joe cheating on his wife, Violet and Joe attempt to continue their relationship, though both are unhappy.
As mentioned earlier, Jazz is set in 1926. Throughout the book, Toni Morrison is able to deliver subtle hints about the time period in ways no other author is able to do. An example of the historical context represented in Toni Morrison’s novel is when she refers to the fashion of the time “Voilet would dress her hair for for her the way the girls wore it now: short, bangs paper sharp above the eyebrows? Ear curls? Razor-thin part on the side? Hair sliding into careful waves marcelled to a T.”(page 108). I find that historical citations are one of the major ingredients Toni Morrison uses in her recipe for writing a story.
While the systematic study of the structure and development of language in general or of particular languages and the careful organization of writing so that it is written in a successful and effective way are essential for an author’s style, sentence structure is also an extremely important element to include in the process, I find Toni Morrison does well at formating her sentence structure . She includes a wide variety of different types of sentences, which I feel makes her writing much more fluid.
In addition, Morrison draws the reader’s attention by manipulating sentence length and wording to express the tone or emotion she is trying to convey. This is exemplified through the brief statements that appear in Jazz when Violet is violently reflecting on her husband’s affair: “One man. One defenseless girl. Death” (Jazz 73), Morrison demonstrates her skill in sentence usage very often throughout her works, and the quality of these sentences reflects her overall skill as an author.
To be honest when I was first reading this book I didn’t understand why it didn’t follow any particular structure and why Toni Morrison had structured the novel the way she did but someone explained to me about how they understood Toni Morrison’s novel and they described how Morrison’s novel was a literary interpretation of a jazz song. I wish that I had come up with their conclusion but the way they told me was “Morrison’s creative use of grammar was like the dis-chords of the jazz piano. Her confusing sentence structure was like the ever changing time signature from the drums and the piano coming in just that little bit after the off beat. The long unexplained side-plots are like improvised saxophone solos that do what they like and break all the rules. Morrison said that the “reader didn’t need to see it so much as feel what it was like” (Morrison 1993) and that is exactly what I understood the double bass player to be doing as he closed his eyes without a second glance at his sheet music and let the notes run in and out of his soul.”
In conclusion there are numerous components that add up to form an author’s style. A few recognizable traits of Morrison’s work include the use of similes and creative analogies, excerpts from history to make the stories legitimate, and diverse sentence structure. All of these aspects combine to make Toni Morrison’s complex and intricate novels what they are today. This author’s distinctive style is what has made her so legendary and prominent in the literary world.
Works Cited
Ciment, James. End of world war 1 to the great crash. Abingdon, Routledge, 2015. This book gives incite on the Jazz age, the period after world war 1 to the great crash, it tells the history of this time and its people. I’m using this book to research a possible question I want to write my argument about which is, Would the story exist if it were written in a different time and place? I’m starting to read more into the jazz age to look a what the environment African Americans lived in at this time.
Gillespie, Carmen. Critical Companion to Toni Morrison. E-book, New York, 2008. Facts on File library of American literature, Facts on File library of American literature.. -Critical companion to Toni Morrison [electronic resource] : a literary reference to her life and work.
-Presents a biography of Nobel Prize-winning American writer Toni Morrison, features synopses and critical assessments of her novels, children’s books, nonfiction books, essays, interviews, speeches, and cinematic, theatrical, musical, poetic, and dance productions, and discusses related people, places, and topics.
Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York, Knopf, 1992. In the winter of 1926, when everyone everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead. Joe trace, a middle age waiter who moonlights as a door to door salesman of cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. at a funeral, joe’s wife, violet, attracts the girls corpse. this passionate, profound story of love and obsession by nobel prize laureate toni morrison brings us back and forth in time as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
Jazz Toni Morrison Sparknotes
Toni Morrison. Edited by Harold Bloom, e-book, New York, 2011. Bloom’s modern critical views, Bloom’s modern critical views. Presents eleven essays on the concepts and texts of African-American female writer Toni Morrison, and includes a chronology and a bibliography.