Mitografía y mitopoeia del jazz y del blues en la cultura estadounidense contemporánea= Jazz and blues-idiomatic mythography and mythopoeia in contemporary american culture

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.