'Uses of the erotic': The non -hermeneutic as a site of aesthetic, political, and personal reclamation in black women's novels

"Uses of the Erotic": The Non-Hermeneutoc as a Site of Aesthetic, Political, and Personal Reclamation in Black Women's Novels borrows Audre Lorde's construction of the erotic as a potential source of female empowerment. A poetics of the erotic opens ideological and artistic spaces related to the non-hermeneutic. That which escapes or disrupts interpretation, the non-hermeneutic resists the structural and interpretative containment of the realistic novel, upon which so much of the Western literary tradition rests.;The novels focused on are Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, and Jazz , by Toni Morrison. The three are written by authors who self-consciously employ blackness, in all of its complexity, to inform their artistic and political vision. Central to this is the use of the erotic. Through literary conventions, each work examines how women's lives are impacted by the erotic, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, desire, maternity, race, ethnicity, or class. Simultaneously, in all three novels, orality and music are those aesthetic forms through which the texts are mediated, connecting meaning and structure, infusing the body into the text through the eros of performance, and transforming the novel into the mystery and non-containment of the non-hermeneutic.;Chapter 1 explores how the black body, so rejected within English, can be reclaimed through the deconstruction of language. Chapter 2 analyzes the composition of different musical forms and their importance in the African diaspora. Chapter 3 examines the history that informs black female sexuality and erotic agency. Chapter 4 traces the construction of Corregidora as a blues ritual that allows the re-membering both of slavery's abuses and its toll on the psyches of its survivors. In Chapter 5, No Telephone to Heaven's strategic use of silence in response to the call of Jamaican reggae is interrogated; sound, the willingness of the protagonist to verbally express her fractured identity and sexuality, becomes the movement through which her emotional and political growth can be perceived. Chapter 6, responding to Jazz, presents the jazz musical tradition, fluid, spontaneous, and group-intensive, as a model for the reimagining of deeply erotic black love.