(Download) "Signifying the Blues (Critical Essay)" by Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

February 03, 2021

eBook details

Title: Signifying the Blues (Critical Essay)
Author : Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics
Release Date : January 01, 2001
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 281 KB

Description

The essay offers a philosophical examination of the blues, a uniquely powerful and influential twentieth-century musical genre. The examination is undertaken chiefly with reference to the works of Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis and Martin Heidegger--and to the insightful writings on the blues by Tom Lamont. Overall, the article is an attempt to come to terms with the artistic significance of the blues--in part, as a challenge to traditional aesthetic positions and biases. The blues, the article argues, "signify" not only in having or bestowing meaning, but in the uniquely African-American sense of the term: in a move that "undercuts," that is at once insinuating and subversive, mocking and transformative. The article endeavors to suggest that this transfigurative force--which it argues must be located more in the music than in the lyrics, and not in the music's "form" but in its "matter," its elemental corporeity--can be politically, aesthetically, and even ontologically liberating. Born of suffering and oppression, the blues can offer a profound recasting of the lived world and new possibilities of meaning and expression. **********