Honors Commons Course is on Jazz

The Honors Program at KU has announced its Commons course for spring 2010. This course dovetails with the Commons lecture series on jazz. Info below:

HNRS 492 Writing Jazz

87682 4:15PM – 5:30PM, TR, 106A SP, Mayhew, Jonathan

Jazz is a unique art-form that invites study from a multi-disciplinary approach. “Writing Jazz” will explore the historical evolution of this music from the point of view of literary and intellectual history, highlighting the ways in which poets, essayists, and novelists have responded to the innovations of major figures from Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington to Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis. Virtually from its inception in the 1920s, jazz has been of great interest to composers, writers, and intellectuals on several continents. As a popular art with genteel and intellectual pretensions, subject to conflicting intellectual constructions, jazz offers multiple opportunities for teaching cultural history and critical thinking. The proposed course will not exhaust these possibilities, but instead concentrate on several key problems, especially the role jazz played in the development of the poetics of the Beat Generation and in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. The major themes of the course will be cultural identity and hybridity (transculturation) and the dynamic of literary and intellectuals appropriations.