SOURCE: “Jazzing It UP: The Be-bop Modernism of Langston Hughes,” in Mosaic, Vol. 31, No. 4, December, 1998, pp. 61-82.

In the following essay, Hokanson explores the uses of jazz be-bop as a Modernist technique in the literary works of Langston Hughes.

Although few topics in literary studies these days are more complex and contested than the concept of “modernism,” it would seem that there remains a consensus that its dominant note is, “Make it new!” Similarly, critics tend to agree that modernist innovation entails breaking down boundaries between the arts, so that musical terms like “canto” and pictorial terms like “imagism” have come to be seen as synonymous with the literary modes of the movement. What seems in turn to have initiated the current revisioning of modernism is the way that the notion of barrier-crossing has also come to include breaking down racial and ethnic boundaries, challenging modernism's exclusive association...