랭스턴 휴즈의 음악시 : 블루스와 재즈를 통한 흑인미학의 구현 = Langston Hughes's music poetry : embodiment of the black aesthetic through the blues and jazz

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Ph. D. Thesis

ABSTRACT

Langston Hughes's Music Poetry:
Embodiment of the Black Aesthetic through the Blues and Jazz


Tockgo, Hyun
Department of English
Graduate School
Hankuk University of
Foreign Studies


This thesis attempts to examine the procedure where Langston Hughes combined his poetry with the vernacular tradition for embodiment of the Black Aesthetic. In African-American literature, the "vernacular" refers to the church songs such as spirituals and gospel, the blues, jazz, ballads, sermons, folk-tales, and even rap songs that are part of the oral tradition of black expression. Hughes tried to fuse this vernacular tradition into his literature as a lifelong mission, not just as a temporary task.
Langston Hughes was a versatile and prolific writer. In the forty-six years from his first appearance in a national publication in 1921 until his death in 1967, he published various kinds of works covering all genres. He, however, saw himself first and foremost as a poet, and wanted to be known as such. He was primarily a social poet, but he was also a lyricist. His music poetry indicates his major stylistic and thematic emphases, especially on black identity and its vernacular art. This dual perspective, articulated in his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"(1926), embodies the principles of the Black Aesthetic―insisting that black culture alone is enough to produce and legitimate works of African-American art. In this sense, it can be said Hughes's great achievement was to build negro popular literature into a significant art form.
Some critics say Hughes's approach to poetry is too simple and unlearned. To some readers his poetry may sound radical politically. It's because he aimed to create a body of work epitomizing the truth and the beauty of real African-American situations and experiences. He tried to write a fundamentally new kind of verse telling of ordinary black folks in the language of their typical speech. He didn't turn his face away from the black struggles for political power and economic well-being. To reach his "low-down" audience, Hughes was prepared to write "down" to them. Many of his blues and jazz poems were intended for public recitation, and some started as song lyrics. They were to be performed rather than be read.
In Hughes's poetry, this oral practice is perhaps strongest in those poems modeled on black vernacular music; the blues and jazz poems. Hughes already came to maturity in the 1920s, the classic age of the blues and jazz; and feeling as he did about the beauty of black life, it is natural that he should see black music as a paradigm of the black folk's experience and a suitable mold for his poetry. His blues poems parallel the popular blues and capture that "ironic laughter mixed with tears" which is the spirit and essence of the genre. Similarly, the jazz poems move with the essential gaiety and swiftness of the music, waiting for "a dream deferred" to come true ultimately.
As stated above, this thesis has the purpose of examining Hughes's effort to embody the Black Aesthetic in his poetry through the blues and jazz. With that aim, this thesis analyzes the blues and jazz poems from four volumes of collected poems professing to be "musical" in particular. The blues poems are from The Weary Blues(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew(1927), and the jazz poems are from Montage of a Dream Deferred(1951) and Ask Your Mama(1961). These volumes reflect the music of community in transition.
Chapter Ⅱ, as a preparatory course to the full-scale analysis of Hughes's music poetry, examines the vernacular tradition, tracing the history of the blues and jazz, and then investigates the important concepts related to the Black Aesthetic such as blackness, internal colonialism, double consciousness, identity, hybridity, and so on. These steps help to survey the organic continuity of Hughes's music poetry.
Chapter Ⅲ analyzes the structure and the subject of the blues poems. The poems from The Weary Blues show the transitional process of completing the classic blues structure (AAB form): three lines of lyric, the second line repeating the first line wholly or partly, the third line rhyming with the first two. Through the poems from Fine Clothes to the Jew a variety of subjects are investigated. Hughes's blues poems maintain a single coherent theme following the logic of stanzaic progression. In fact, blues subject matter is inexhaustible and endless, because it is the world and life itself.
In chapter Ⅳ, Hughes's experimental jazz poems are analyzed in terms of an evolutionary transition. Boogie-woogie poems and bebop poems from Montage of a Dream Deferred show the process of shift from the blues to diverse "lower genres" of jazz. Montage could be described as a series of short poems that contribute to the making of one long poem. Ask Your Mama is another montage of a dream deferred. This is a straight jazz-poem sequence set to the accompaniment of the blues and jazz. Subtitled "12 Moods for Jazz," Mama employs the melody of "Hesitation Blues" as its leitmotif, has marginal notes for musical accompaniment, and appends "Liner Notes for the Poetically Unhep." In this sense, Mama could be evaluated as an avant-garde experiment comprehending almost all genres of the vernacular music.
Hughes's music poems are differentiated from most of the other music poems. While the others tend to just employ musical elements partially or imitate musical images superficially, Hughes's works try to embody not only the structure and subject of his people's music, but also its process of evolutionary transition. These serial works are the result of his unceasing efforts to realize the Black Aesthetic through the vernacular tradition. Hughes strived to attain the highest peaks of complexity in his lifelong struggle to integrate his poetry with music.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 서 론 1
• Ⅱ. 흑인토착음악과 흑인미학 19
• Ⅱ-1. 흑인토착음악: 블루스와 재즈 19
• Ⅱ-2. 흑인미학: 이중의식의 극복 49
• Ⅲ. 블루스 전통의 재현 74
• Ⅲ-1. 블루스의 형식:『피곤의 블루스』 74
• Ⅲ-2. 블루스의 주제:『유대인에게 전당잡힌 좋은 옷』 97
• Ⅳ. 재즈의 자유정신 125
• Ⅳ-1. 부기우기에서 비밥까지: 『지연된 꿈의 몽타주』 125
• Ⅳ-2. 프리재즈를 향하여:『네 엄마한테나 물어봐』 150
• Ⅴ. 결 론 173
• Works Cited 177
• Abstract 184