Of the Blues Aesthetic

Skansgaard 1 The “Aesthetic” of the Blues Aesthetic Michael Ryan Skansgaard Homerton College September 2018 This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Skansgaard 2 Declaration: This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. At 79,829 words, the thesis does not exceed the regulation length, including footnotes, references and appendices but excluding the bibliography. This work follows the guidelines of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Acknowledgements: This study has benefitted from the advice of Fiona Green and Philip Coleman, whose feedback has led to a revitalised introduction and conclusion. I am also indebted to Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Robert Dostal, Kristen Treen, Matthew Holman, and Pulane Mpotokwane, who have provided feedback on various chapters; to Simon Jarvis, Geoff Ward, and Ewan Jones, who have served as advisers; and especially to my supervisor, Michael D. Hurley, who has guided my research and held me to the highest standards of prosodic specificity. Finally, I thank my mother, Christine Schlosser, for motivating me to pursue a career in higher education, and for her endless patience in listening to my ideas. Abstract: This study of the “Blues Aesthetic” both supplements and revises the now-dominant socio-aesthetic paradigm by introducing the perspectives of cognitive aesthetics to African- American vernacular literary criticism. New methods of scansion, informed by literary and linguistic prosody, are developed to measure previously neglected or misclassified innovations in verse practice. Chapter 1 argues that the versificational structures of the blues tradition, enriched by African-diasporic technique, cannot be measured adequately by existing systems of English prosody. Chapter 2 identifies figures of speech that developed during plantation slavery and considers their legacy in African-American literary verse. Chapter 3 examines the often- counterintuitive influence of racial caricature on the verse practices of black writers and performance artists in the blues tradition. Chapter 4, which builds on these insights, reassesses the formal practices of blues poets. Chiastic polyrhythms, blues-sonnet hybrids, and experimental uses of 12-bar phrasing are discovered and evaluated. Finally, several now-forgotten or misconstrued advances in vernacular aesthetic theory are recuperated. What emerges from this far-reaching intervention is a more interdisciplinary, stylistically complex, and demographically diverse map of the blues tradition as a category of literary art. Skansgaard 3 Notes Italics in quotations appear in the original unless otherwise noted. Parenthetical citations of poems indicate line numbers or, where this is impractical, volume and page number. Compilations are abbreviated alphabetically (e.g., “CW” for Collected Works) and other titles by the initial word or phrase (e.g., “Life” for The Life of Langston Hughes). Where this is impractical, the following abbreviations are used: ATPR Helen Vendler, “Are These the Poems to Remember?” BANP James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry BANS James Weldon Johnson, The Books of American Negro Spirituals BP Amiri Baraka, Blues People BBAP Harold Bloom, The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997 CPo Robert Hayden, Collected Poems CPr Robert Hayden, Collected Prose HRW Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why LHB Steven C. Tracy, Langston Hughes and the Blues LH-BC Harold Bloom, Langston Hughes (Bloom’s BioCritiques) LH-CRSG Harold Bloom, Langston Hughes (Comprehensive Research and Study Guide) LH-MCV Harold Bloom, Langston Hughes (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views) LH-CPA Arnold Rampersad, “Langston Hughes and the Challenges of Populist Art” LH-FCJ Arnold Rampersad, “Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew.” NPD Sterling Brown, Negro Poetry and Drama NC Sterling Brown, The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes REP Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry RPEV Richard Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse Skansgaard 4 Table of Contents Introduction i: What is blues “aesthetic” criticism? . 6 ii: What is the African-American “vernacular” tradition and why do its origins matter? . 12 iii: What rules must an “authentic” blues poem follow? . 26 Chapter 1: Form 1.1: Harmony . 35 1.2: Worrying . 45 1.3: Call-and-Response Patterning . 54 1.4: Dolnik Verse . 64 1.5: The 12-Bar Stanza . 72 1.6: The Weary Blues . 81 Chapter 2: Figurative Language 2.1: Speaking Double . 88 2.2: Lyric Persona . 93 2.3: Irony . 96 2.4: Iconography . 102 2.5: Voice . 110 2.6: Interior Monologue . 114 Chapter 3: History 3.1: Reason . 122 3.2: Juba . 130 3.3: Jim Crow . 134 3.4: Topsy and Eva . 139 Skansgaard 5 3.5: Topsy and African-American Music . 144 3.6: The Cakewalk Aesthetic . 155 Chapter 4: Experimental Prosody 4.1: Rhetoric . 163 4.2: The Blues Sonnet . 181 4.3: Phrasing . 200 Conclusion . 222 Works Cited . 236 Skansgaard 6 Introduction i: What is blues “aesthetic” criticism? The 10-point definition of blues poetry established by Stephen E. Henderson (Understanding 47) and refined by Craig Hansen Werner (Playing 149) is too stylistically broad and too ethnically narrow to demarcate the genre’s boundaries. Werner himself worries that the field known as blues aesthetic criticism has become a de facto racial category: “When in doubt, the unofficial critical truism concerning black writing goes, say it comes from the blues” (Playing 149). “There is hardly a black poet who has not used the word ‘blues’ in the title of at least one poem,” reads Eberhard Alsen’s dictionary entry on “The Blues” (105). Many of these poems, including “Colored Blues Singer” by Countee Cullen and “Blue” by Carl Phillips, are anthologised in Kevin Young’s Blues Poems, even though Cullen and Phillips eschew the 12-bar stanza and reject the Hughesian blues tradition. Meanwhile, numerous experimental uses of 12-bar phrasing are excluded from Young’s anthology, including Jean Toomer’s “November Cotton Flower” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Songs for a Colored Singer.” Young’s unclear principles of selection, which seem to favour titles and themes over structure and style, attest to what Jeffrey B. Ferguson calls the “generous parameters” of “current blues aesthetic criticism” (700). Although the “blues aesthetic” is well-established in African-American literary criticism (Baraka, “Blues Aesthetic” 101-109; B. Baker 155-158), the meanings of its constituent terms are contested. The blues encompasses several related concepts: a tragicomic feeling rooted in the conditions of second-class citizenship; a 12-bar stanza form; a musical tradition; a social protest movement; a literary genre of North American verse, drama, and prose; a field of literary criticism. As indicated by the title of this study, the word aesthetic is particularly troublesome. This is not, as one might expect, because the expansive history of ancient and modern aesthetic theories makes the standard usage impossible to pin down. Rather, the trouble is that blues aesthetic criticism overlaps with two very different paradigms: one that studies aesthetic response primarily as a product of musico-linguistic competence, and one that studies aesthetic response primarily as a product of socio-cultural competence. In the broader field of literary theory, these paradigms are Skansgaard 7 often called formalism and historicism; in the narrower field of verse criticism, they are known as cognitive poetics and historical poetics.1 Cognitive poetics is “cognitive” because it investigates, as Yopie Prins puts it, what happens to “your brain on poetry” (19). Its methods are derived from philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, prosody, gestalt theory, and more generally, any theory that can clarify the relationship between literary art and aesthetic cognition (Tsur, Toward 6; Freeman, “Cognitive” 314). Rather than rejecting outdated theories, cognitive poetics prefers to reorient and redeploy them (Stockwell 6). Historical poetics is “historical” because it investigates, in the words of Virginia Jackson, “the history of the interpretation of lyric poetry” (6). Relative to cognitive poetics, historical poetics focuses more on the practices of readers (rather than writers), the synchronic (rather than diachronic) analysis of poetic form and literary history, and the circulation of texts though discursive channels of politics, economics, and popular culture (rather than through a sphere of canonical influence). The methods favoured by historical poetics include literary (but seldom linguistic) prosody, history, sociology, and elements of race, class, and gender theory. Cognitive poetics focuses on how “poets make poetry”; historical poetics focuses on how “poetry makes poets” (Said 12). From their very different vantage points, Matthew Arnold and Michel Foucault both indicate that

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