COMP 156
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Jazz
Last Offered Spring 2013
Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed AFR 156 / AMST 156 / COMP 156 / ENGL 223 / MUS 156
This course is not offered in the current catalog or this is a previous listing for a current course.

Taking its title from the Wallace Stevens poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which interprets the blackbird in different ways, this course similarly explores a more complex, multi-layered perspective on jazz, from jazz and American democracy to jazz in visual art. Accordingly, the course introduces students to several genres, including historical documents, cultural criticism, music, literature, film, photography and art. The course does not draw on a musicological method but rather a socio-cultural analysis of the concept, music and its effect–so students are not required to have any prior musical knowledge or ability. In this writing intensive course, students will write short close analyses of multiple types of media, ultimately building up to an argumentative essay. This EDI course explores the musical expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of jazz signify on institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to contest it.