Michael H. Kater, Professor of History at York University, Toronto, gives a short history of Jazz in Weimar Germany. He writes, “American jazz was imported into Germany in the early 1920s” (145). However, “[T]he great majority of German musicians still found jazz very difficult to master”, which is why “Americans and a few Englishmen… came to dominate the jazz scene of those Roaring Twenties” (145). Though as the decade came to a close “some younger German musicians were proficient enough to be accepted as sidemen into American and British touring bands” (146).He continues, “By 1930, moreover, radio broadcasts of jazz or jazz-inspired dance music were becoming more regular” which was popular among “urban upper-middle-class boys in their late teens” (146). 

Though rising right-wing nationalism in Germany came to be disgusted by jazz,“racist argumentation was employed, as it was then fashionable in politically rightist circles, against ‘Niggers’, who were thought to have invented jazz, and Jews, depicted as multiplying and marketing the music” (154). Anti-Black Racism was fierce in Europe, as well as Germany, “Anti-Negro racism was supported by the alleged results of science, by a positivistic strain of cultural anthropology in vogue since the Second Empire” (154). Beliefs “proven” by science included, “no woolly-haired Negroes were capable of ‘a true inner culture and of a higher mental development”(154), the Negro was “docile” and could even play a musical instrument, but “lacked the facility for true creativity and abstract thought” (155). This along with the myth of black men as rapists would be pushed by the Nazi party. 

This article, I will use to provide further context, on the works of Langston Hughes, the mostly Jewish German translators and publishers of his work. No text is written in a vacuum, and it is important to understand the political and cultural background of a text lest we put our preconceptions or values in a text that might not have had them.

Works Cited

Michael H. Kater, The Jazz Experience in Weimar Germany, German History, Volume 6, Issue 2, April 1988, Pages 145–158, https://doi.org/10.1093/gh/6.2.145

“Singing the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Translation, and Diasporic Blues” is the sixth chapter of the book The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany, written by Jonathan O. Wipplinger, by Assistant Professor of German at the  University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The book is a history of the influence of Jazz in Weimar Germany, the democratic Germany between the First World War and the rise of the Nazi Party in 1933. 

The sixth chapter, in particular focuses on the translation of Harlem Renaissance poets. Harlem Renaissance poetry and Jazz music are linked. In Weimar Germany, the earliest German translation of Harlem Renaissance writers were by German Jews, such as Hans Goslar, an ardent zionist and a “strong supporter of Weimar democracy”, who connected the plight of Black Americans to Jewish Germans (Wippenlinger 169). The German Jewish translators also Germanized, makinging several “changes to  sentence structure and wording” (Wipplinger 171). the works of Harlem Renaissance poets for example setting them to Classical Music, or translating them in a way to seem German, which in Translation Studies is called Domestication. Wippenlinger writes, “ 

This chapter provided references to several German newspapers. I read these news papers, providing more information for me. 

Works Cited

Wipplinger, Jonathan O. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. University of Michigan Press, 2017. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1qv5n7m.

Throughout Passing, there is a theme of classification, how classificiation affects people, and how people subvert classifications. In the novella, there are two classifications that the characters: Claire Kendry and Irene Redfield subvert, the Black race and the White race. Nella Larson was familiar with classification, she was a librarian. As a librarian, she understood how classification systems worked. As a black librarian, she knew how these classifications marginalized women and people of color, and were arbitrary. 

In “Nella Larsen, Librarian at 135th Street”, Karin Roffman writes “Nella Larsen’s work as a librarian was a catalyst in her rethinking of social issues, particularly her concerns about how systems of classification work to inhibit the creation of new categories of thinking” (752). During the time Larsen was a student, she would have studied the eleventh edition of the Dewey Decimal System. The Dewey Decimal system, named after its inventor Melvil Dewey, is an ambitious classification system that Dewey believed could account “for all present and past knowledge, but also for all future knowledge” (756). The same way racial classification sought to catalogue all variations in the human family. Like both systems, they would show the biases of the classifier and the arbitrariness of the classifications. 

The Dewey Decimal System divides all human knowledge into ten categories each given a digit, which can be divided into 10 categories ad infinitem. For example, in a library books on language would be numbered within the ranges of 400-499. However, the system shows its 19th century American bias. English, German, French Italian, Latin, Greek are get their own main categories. All other languages are labeled “Minor Languages”, thus language unrelated to each other such as Arabic and Chinese, Persian and Coptic, Celtic and Japanese are relegated into the same category. For example, a book on Russian (an Indo-Europoean language) is frequently next to books on Arabic, which can be next to books on Japanese. In other words, according to this system all these languages are throw-away. 

Works Cited

Roffmann, Karin. “Nella Larsen, Librarian at 135th Street.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 53, no. 4, 2007, pp. 752-787

Donald E. Handy and Heather K. Hardy, in their article “Love, Death and War: Metaphorical Interaction in Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’”, interpret the dialogue between the two unnamed characters, “The American” and “The Girl”, in  Hemingway short story “Hills Like White Elephants”. They argue, that the dialogue is based upon the “cultural metaphor…called ARGUMENT IS WAR” (E. Hardy and K Hardy). They set the scene, in more metaphorical terms, the battlefield, and explain characters battle plan.

Prussian General and military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “Der Krieg ist also ein Akt der Gewalt, um den Gegner zur Erfüllung unseres Willens zu zwingen” (4).  In English, it can be translated as “War is thus an act of violence to force the opponent to the fulfillment of our will.” The same way war is an act of violence (Akt der Gewalt) to get what one wants, argumentation is an  act of speech (Akt der Sprache) to get what one wants. When we speak of argument,we tend to talk about it in terms of war. For example: she attacked my position, he defended his position, she has a strong argument, she has a weak argument, he lost the argument, he won the argument. 

Continuing the metaphor of warfare will bring us to the metaphor of duality. Warfare is, in the words of Clausewitz,  “Der Krieg ist nichts als ein erweiterter Zweikampf.” (3). In English, it can be translated as “War is nothing but an extended deul”. Emphasis on the word Zweikampf, literally “two-struggle”. In Hemingway’s short story, there are two wills, each one wanting the other to fulfill the will. They are traveling from one city, Barcelona (which speaks Catalan) to another city Madrid (which speaks Castilian), even the name of the river has two names: A Castilian speaker would say “I crossed the Ebro”, but a Catalan would say I crossed the Ebre”. The dialogue in “Hills like white Elephants” is the story of two wills, trying to force the other to theirs.After reading the article I became more cognizant of how we argue, and how the “Argument is War” metaphor can lead to conflict, which made me go back to an old military book, Vom Kriege, and made me aware of how duality is found throughout the short story. 

Works Cited

Hardy, Donald E., and Heather K. Hardy. “Love, Death and War: Metaphorical Interaction in Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’.” Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 168, Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center,          https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420110528/GLS?u=durham_tccl&sid=GLS&xid=0becb036. Accessed 18 Sept. 2019. Originally published in Language and Literature, vol. 15, 1990, pp. 1-56.

Clausewitz, Carl von. Vom Kriege. Berlin, 1832. Google Books,                          https://books.google.com/books?id=vQpUAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0    #v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed 19 August 2019.   

Language is clay to poets. Poets take the unworked clay and fashion it to their design. The late Professor of Southern Methodist  University, Laurence Perrine, argues that Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem. “Miniver Cheevy” is an exemplar of how poets fashion language to express themselves. 

Perrine analyzes the Poem, stanza by stanza, for poetic devices and allusions used by Robinson. For example, in the first line of the first stanza, which reads “Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn” (1). Here, Perrine explains that this line can be understood in two ways. One way of reading indicates that “scorn” is the parent of Cheevy (66). The other way of reading the line is that Cheevy is “the object of scorn”, analogous to the phrase “child of misfortune” (66). Another example in the sixth stanza of the poem, Perrine explains the use of alliteration and the irony of calling “iron clothing” graceful (70). In short, Perrine anatomized the poem, and explained the function of each poetic organ.

I found this article edifying. I learned some new things about the poem that I did not get with the first reading. However, I wished the article would mention to parallels between Miniver Cheevy and Don Quixote. Both were men, who wished to be born in a previous time, and both are satires that are in the form of the thing they are a satire of. The novel Don Quixote satirized Chivalric Romances, libros de caballerías, while also being a novel in the form of Chivalric Romance. Likewise, “Miniver Cheevy” is a satire of romantic poetry in the form of romantic poetry.

Works Cited

Perrine, Laurence. “A Reading of Miniver Cheevy.” Colby Library Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2, 1962, pp. 65-74.

Robinson, Edwin Arlington. “Miniver Cheevy.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44978/miniver-cheevy

My name is Khalifa Muhammad. I am southern on my mothers side is northern on my father’s side is from New York. I enjoy reading non-fiction as well as novels. In particular I enjoy science fiction, historical fiction, and poetry. I have recently finished reading the novel Dune and am currently reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

As I reader, before I read I book I like to ask myself four questions: When was this book written, by whom was it written, for whom was it written, and the historical context of it. Literature is never built in a vacuum. The language use, the allegories, literary devices, and social circumstances all influence a book. A book like 1984 could only be written in the aftermath of facisim. Dune could not exist without the infleunce of oil, Islam or Middle Eastern culture. 

The reader too is not in a vacuum. A woman reader, a black man, and a white man, etc can read the same text but get a different message or experience from it. 

I am familiar with the poet Emily Dickenson, I have read some of her poetry in High School, Waltwhitman, I know him through reading transcendentalists like Thoreau, I am familiar with the name Fitzgerald but have not read any of his works. I am a fan of Harlem Renaissance writers and have reading poetry by Hughes and some of his Proses. I have also read some of the works of James Baldwin (he visited the Masjid I attend in Durham in 1963.)

I am excited to read Harlem Renaissance literature as well as women authors. I will admit, I can count on my hand the number of female authors I have read.