Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction since James Joyce

Literature & Fiction

Werner, Craig

United States

University of Illinois Press

In Playing the Changes, Craig Hansen Werner presents a polyrhythmic approach to the continuities and discontinuities of the American literary tradition. He focuses on the relationship between two superficially distinct traditions: European (post)modernism and African American culture in both literary and musical forms.A primary contribution of Playing the Changes is its exploration of different "phrasings" of issues important to highly conscious African American artists from the late nineteenth century (Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman) to the 1990s (Toni Morrison's Jazz).A final sequence highlights the centrality of black music to African American writing, arguing that recognizing blues, gospel, and jazz as theoretically suggestive cultural practices rather than specific musical forms points to what is most distinctive in twentieth-century African American writing: its ability to subvert attempts to limit its engagement with psychological, historical, political, or aesthetic realities.

Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse

History & Criticism

In Playing the Changes, Craig Hansen Werner presents a polyrhythmic approach to the continuities and discontinuities of the American literary tradition. He focuses on the relationship between two superficially distinct traditions: European (post)modernism and African American culture in both literary and musical forms. A primary contribution of Playing the Changes is its exploration of different "phrasings" of issues important to highly conscious African American artists from the late nineteenth century (Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman) to the 1990s (Toni Morrison's Jazz). A final sequence highlights the centrality of black music to African American writing, arguing that recognizing blues, gospel, and jazz as theoretically suggestive cultural practices rather than specific musical forms points to what is most distinctive in twentieth-century African American writing: its ability to subvert attempts to limit its engagement with psychological, historical, political, or aesthetic realities.

Playing the Changes: FROM AFRO-MODERNISM TO THE JAZZ IMPULSE

An intimate oral history of the turbulent career of one of rock music's most celebrated groups documents the story of Creedence Clearwater Revival from their early struggles, to their rise of stardom, to the battles that drove them apart. Original.

Up Around the Bend : The Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival (For the Record Series Number 7)

Biographies & Memoirs

MARSH, DAVE

Arts & Literature

Harper-perennial

Explores the relationship between African American popular music and American culture through a review of artists' music

A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America

Arts & Photography

Music

Plume

". . . extraordinarily far-reaching. . . . highly accessible." -Notes "No one has written this way about music in a long, long time. Lucid, insightful, with real spiritual, political, intellectual, and emotional grasp of the whole picture. A book about why music matters, and how, and to whom." -Dave Marsh, author of Louie, Louie and Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story "This book is urgently needed: a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music, both as music and as seen in a larger social context. No one can do this better than Craig Werner." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University "[Werner has] mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotion, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories." -African American Review A Change Is Gonna Come is the story of more than four decades of enormously influential black music, from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement, to the slick pop of Motown; from the disco inferno to the Million Man March; from Woodstock's "Summer of Love" to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write "What's Going On." Originally published in 1998, A Change Is Gonna Come drew the attention of scholars and general readers alike. This new edition, featuring four new and updated chapters, will reintroduce Werner's seminal study of black music to a new generation of readers. Craig Werner is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and author of many books, including Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse and Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival. His most recent book is Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul.

A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America

University of Michigan Press

In Higher Ground, one of our most insightful music writers brilliantly reinterprets the lives of three pop geniuses and the soul revolution they launched. Soul music is one of America's greatest cultural achievements, and Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Curtis Mayfield are three of its most inspired practitioners. In midcentury America it was soul music--particularly the dazzling stream of recordings made by these three stars--that helped bring the gospel vision of the black church into the mainstream, energizing the era’s social movements and defining a new American gospel where the sacred and the secular met. What made this gospel all the more amazing was that its most influential articulators were the sons and daughters of sharecroppers, storefront preachers, and single parents in the projects, whose genius gave voice to a new vision of American possibility. Higher Ground seamlessly weaves the specific and intensely personal narratives of Stevie, Aretha, and Curtis’s lives into the historical fabric of their times. The three shared many similarities: They were all children of the great migration and of the black church. But the gospel impulse manifested itself in different ways within the dramas of their individual lives and musical creations. In Stevie Wonder’s case, it was a literally color-blind universal sense of spirituality that expressed itself in his life and music as an urge toward transcendence, particularly in the mid-seventies when albums like Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life radically revised what a pop album could be. For Aretha Franklin, the traditional gospel vision of a beloved community anchored in the strength of women comforted her through a life littered with tragedy and found expression in propulsive pop songs like "Respect" as well as in her legendary gospel albums. And for Curtis Mayfield, the gospel notion of conscious living inspired him to create songs that served the purposes of the Civil Rights movement and the radical Black Power movement alike, from the gritty street drama of Superfly to the transcendent call of "People Get Ready." Werner doesn't just provide a narrative of three fascinating lives; he ties them together with a provocative thesis about American history and culture that compels us to reconsider both the music and the times. And aside from the personalities and the history, he writes beautifully about music itself, the nuts and bolts of its creation and performance, in a way that brings a new awareness and understanding to the most familiar music, forcing readers to listen to songs they've heard a thousand times with fresh ears. In Higher Ground, Werner illuminates the lives of three unparalleled American artists, reminding us why their music mattered then and still resonates with us today.

Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul

Crown

Dubliners: A Pluralistic World (Twayne's Masterwork Studies) (Vol 20) [Aug 01, 1988] Werner, Craig

Dubliners: A Pluralistic World (Twayne's Masterwork Studies)

Twayne Pub

Dubliners: A Pluralistic World (Masterworks Studies, No 20)

Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, And The Rise And Fall Of american Soul

Three Rivers Press

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