Throughout Jazz （2004）, Morrison revises language and stakes a generic revolution within her linguistic one. Problematising language, she interrogates its role by disrupting all metaphoric operation and normative op...Throughout Jazz （2004）, Morrison revises language and stakes a generic revolution within her linguistic one. Problematising language, she interrogates its role by disrupting all metaphoric operation and normative operations of traditional Westem narratology, challenging ontological distinction, and undermining a novelistic claim of/for reality. Morrison creates the novel as a parody of itself. As a metafictional object, she （re）visions the fiction with multiple agendas--a means to interrogate the reality of its constitution and to implicate the political consequences inherent in that constitutional process of construction. By creating a series of antagonisms, oppositions, contradictions, equivalences, and intertextualities, Morrison transforms （and transmutes） novelistic ＂hostility＂ into a generic ＂trauma＂ simultaneously rendering it as realistic experience, historic event, personal story, collective memory, narrative device, and psychological phenomena. Exposing trauma by virtue of its linguistic symptoms, Morrison draws attention to the underlying mechanisms, structures, and apparatuses of Western linguistic codes that determine, produce, and maintain the ultimate （un）knowability of the past. This paper will examine all these and how the elliptical tendency of language surfaces the psychological disfigurement of the characters within the form of linguistic codes revealing the metaphorical tendency in Jazz to manifest its own reflective construction （and self-conscious deconstruction）.展开更多
文摘Throughout Jazz （2004）, Morrison revises language and stakes a generic revolution within her linguistic one. Problematising language, she interrogates its role by disrupting all metaphoric operation and normative operations of traditional Westem narratology, challenging ontological distinction, and undermining a novelistic claim of/for reality. Morrison creates the novel as a parody of itself. As a metafictional object, she （re）visions the fiction with multiple agendas--a means to interrogate the reality of its constitution and to implicate the political consequences inherent in that constitutional process of construction. By creating a series of antagonisms, oppositions, contradictions, equivalences, and intertextualities, Morrison transforms （and transmutes） novelistic ＂hostility＂ into a generic ＂trauma＂ simultaneously rendering it as realistic experience, historic event, personal story, collective memory, narrative device, and psychological phenomena. Exposing trauma by virtue of its linguistic symptoms, Morrison draws attention to the underlying mechanisms, structures, and apparatuses of Western linguistic codes that determine, produce, and maintain the ultimate （un）knowability of the past. This paper will examine all these and how the elliptical tendency of language surfaces the psychological disfigurement of the characters within the form of linguistic codes revealing the metaphorical tendency in Jazz to manifest its own reflective construction （and self-conscious deconstruction）.
