Writing blue: Performing spirituality, freedom, and repetition in blues literature

While scholars have traced the manner in which authors infuse blues rhythms and themes into literature, they often metaphorically cast these authors as blues singers, their texts as blues songs, and their readers as audience members listening in the crowd. This dissertation builds upon the wealth of scholarship that has already addressed "how" authors appropriate blues theme and structure and involves going beyond stating a blues text is "like" a blues song — going beyond simply talking "about" blues—by creating a template with which readers can perform blues texts and "write blue" within the context of literary scholarship. The approach herein, which focuses in part on Toni Morrison, places her within the context of both her predecessors (Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison) and contemporaries (Alice Walker and August Wilson), is divided roughly into two major parts. The first part requires a re-assessment of three diverse sets of critical traditions vital to literary scholarship — reception theory, African American studies, and cultural studies. The second part re-envisions three emergent traditions by examining active participation and freedom of response as encouraged through "popular" readings displayed in scholarship analyzing group reading practices, performance studies, culminating in the appropriation of the analytical possibilities embedded in fanfiction. The entirety of the project establishes a template for a printed blues performance that culminates in a performance of Chicken Little, a minor character from Morrison's Sula, where to write him is to write blue.