E-Prints Complutense

Abstract

The object of this dissertation is to examine the mythopoeic intricacies involved in the representation of jazz in discursive forms ranging from fiction to non-fiction, from journalism to documentary film. I use Laurence Coupe‟s distinction between mythography and mythopoeia as the starting point. Coupe defines mythopoeia as those literary works “tending to create or re-create certain narratives which human beings take to be crucial to their understanding of their world” (2009: 4), or, in other words, “the capacity to produce myths and to provide a model of the world” (2009: 34). Mythography, on the other hand, is “the interpretation of myth” (2009: 4); it requires the scholar to read “which paradigms are of interest, and how to interpret them” (2009: 13). My role, therefore, is that of a mythographer, as I attempt to decipher the manner by which myth colonizes jazz and the blues idiom to create a cultural construct, one composed of a series of images aiming towards universal representation and eternalization. I have chosen to deal with several genres as part of the corpus because my aim is not to establish the mythopoeic tendencies of jazz solely at a literary level, but to attempt to grasp the impact that these narratives had at a cultural scale. It is hard to say whether the narrative corpus which is the material for analysis has determined the methodological approach or viceversa.