Blues Music Narrative

Alice Walker,as one of the representative writers of African-American feminism,won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple,leaving her poetry works unheeded and mostly unexplored.This thesis will look through Walker’s poetry writing and analyze her integration of poetry and blues music in an effort to illustrate her concern,reflections and optimistic feelings about life of African Americans which contain magnificent political and cultural connotations.The musicality of sound is an essential feature of African-American poetry,for the sound structure of a poetic text is inseparable from its textual meaning.Textualized sound is,to a greater extent,a product of conscious practice of African-American poets,as well as a strategy for the construction of poetic texts and poetic significance.Alice Walker’s poetry collection,Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete is rich in the elements of blues narratives,including the application of repetitions and windings,improvisational performances,“call-and-response”,oral language/dialects,etc.This thesis explains Walker’s embrace of blues narratives from the following three aspects: firstly,the themes of Walker’s poetry are consistent with the core of the blues’ narrative affect: the affective keynotes of melancholy,wrath and ethnic pride;secondly,field hollers,“call and response” and improvisational performances as sound forms in her poetry highlights the sound meaning of poetry rather than its literal meaning;thirdly,the repetitions of words,sentences and paragraphs,the trochees and rhythms along with the oral language/dialects exhibit the textualization of blues narrative in Walker’s poetry,which not only strengthens the voice of the poetic text,but also establishes the affective keynotes of the poem.As the internal structure and main component of poetry,sound not only predominates in Walker’s poetry,but also agrees with the narrative characteristics of blues narrative.The sound of African American poetry embodies profound cultural roots,responding to the human nature of self-expression and the requirements of modern technology.It echoes and inspires the poetics of sound of other African American poets,which promotes the diversification and modernization of American poetry.Walker continues and expands the sonic poetic tradition of African American poetry,integrating poetry and blues music to reveal the powerful life energy and cultural spirit of African Americans.Intermedia research has become a hot academic topic currently,and in this context,understanding Walker’s poetry from the perspective of poetics of sound undoubtedly provides an important research perspective for the study on Walker as well as the study on poetry.