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Author: John S. Wright Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1604730757 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
In 1952, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) published his novel Invisible Man, which transformed the dynamics of American literature. The novel won the National Book Award, extended the themes of his early short stories, and dramatized in fictional form the cultural theories expressed in his later essay collections Shadow & Act and Going to the Territory. In Shadowing Ralph Ellison, John Wright traces Ellison's intellectual and aesthetic development and the evolution of his cultural philosophy throughout his long career. The book explores Ellison's published fiction, his criticism and correspondence, and his passionate exchanges with—and impact on—other literary intellectuals during the Cold War 1950s and during the culture wars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Wright examines Ellison's body of work through the lens of Ellison's cosmopolitan philosophy of art and culture, which the writer began to construct during the late 1930s. Ellison, Wright argues, eschewed orthodoxy in both political and cultural discourse, maintaining that to achieve the highest cultural awareness and the greatest personal integrity, the individual must cultivate forms of thinking and acting that are fluid, improvisational, and vitalistic—like the blues and jazz. Accordingly, Ellison elaborated throughout his body of work the innumerable ways that rigid cultural labels, categories, and concepts—from racial stereotypes and fashionable academic theories to conventional political doctrines—fail to capture the full potential of human consciousness. Instead, Ellison advocated forms of consciousness and culture akin to what the blues and jazz reveal, and he portrayed those musical traditions as the best embodiment of the evolving American spirit.
Author: John S. Wright Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1604730757 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
In 1952, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) published his novel Invisible Man, which transformed the dynamics of American literature. The novel won the National Book Award, extended the themes of his early short stories, and dramatized in fictional form the cultural theories expressed in his later essay collections Shadow & Act and Going to the Territory. In Shadowing Ralph Ellison, John Wright traces Ellison's intellectual and aesthetic development and the evolution of his cultural philosophy throughout his long career. The book explores Ellison's published fiction, his criticism and correspondence, and his passionate exchanges with—and impact on—other literary intellectuals during the Cold War 1950s and during the culture wars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Wright examines Ellison's body of work through the lens of Ellison's cosmopolitan philosophy of art and culture, which the writer began to construct during the late 1930s. Ellison, Wright argues, eschewed orthodoxy in both political and cultural discourse, maintaining that to achieve the highest cultural awareness and the greatest personal integrity, the individual must cultivate forms of thinking and acting that are fluid, improvisational, and vitalistic—like the blues and jazz. Accordingly, Ellison elaborated throughout his body of work the innumerable ways that rigid cultural labels, categories, and concepts—from racial stereotypes and fashionable academic theories to conventional political doctrines—fail to capture the full potential of human consciousness. Instead, Ellison advocated forms of consciousness and culture akin to what the blues and jazz reveal, and he portrayed those musical traditions as the best embodiment of the evolving American spirit.
Author: Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807179213 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
With In the Shadow of Invisibility, Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. offers a long-overdue reconsideration of Ralph Ellison, examining the trajectory of his intellectual thought in relation to its resonances in twenty-first-century American culture. Bland charts Ellison’s evolving attitudes on several central topics including democracy, race, identity, social community, place, and political expression. This compelling new exploration of Ellison’s legacy stresses the perpetual need to reexamine the intersections of race, literature, and American culture, with particular attention to how the democratic principle has grown increasingly urgent in the nation’s ongoing, and often contentious, conversations about race. Arguing that Ellison saw racial and social identity as being inseparable from the nation’s past and its complicated history of racial anxiety, In the Shadow of Invisibility traces the growth and transformation of Ellison’s ideas across his life and work, from his early apprentice writing that culminated in his groundbreaking first novel, Invisible Man, through the posthumous publication of his unfinished second novel, Three Days before the Shooting . . . Focused on his mythic vision of the promise of America, this book firmly situates Ellison in the sociopolitical environments from which his ideas arose, with close consideration of his published writings, including his influential essays on literature and jazz, as well as his working notes and correspondence. Bland foregrounds Ellison’s thinking on the responsibilities of Black writers to examine democratic ideals, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and the impacts of civil rights movements. Interweaving biography, history, and literary criticism, and drawing from extensive archival research, In the Shadow of Invisibility reveals the extent to which Ellison’s work exposes the contradictions inherent in American culture, arguing anew for the importance and immediacy of his writings in the broader context of American intellectual thought.
Author: Michael D. Hill Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0313350906 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is one of the most widely read works of African American literature. This book gives students a thorough yet concise introduction to the novel. Included are chapters on the creation of the novel, its plot, its historical and social contexts, the themes and issues it addresses, Ellison's literary style, and the critical reception of the work. Students will welcome this book as a guide to the novel and the concerns it raises. The volume offers a detailed summary of the plot of Invisible Man as well as a discussion of its origin. It additionally considers the social, historical, and political contexts informing Ellison's work, along with the themes and issues Ellison addresses. It explores Ellison's literary art and surveys the novel's critical reception. Students will value this book for what it says about Invisible Man as well as for its illumination of enduring social concerns.
Author: Paul Devlin Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108802230 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 751
Book Description
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the second-most assigned American novel since 1945 and is one of the most enduring. It is studied by many thousands of high school and college students every year and has been since the 1950s. His landmark essays, with their blend of personal history and cultural theory, have been extraordinarily influential. Ralph Ellison in Context includes authoritative chapters summing up longstanding conversations, while offering groundbreaking essays on a variety of topics not yet covered in the copious critical and biographical literature. It provides fresh perspectives on some of the most important people and places in Ellison's life, and explores where his work and biography cross paths with some of the pressing topics of his time. It includes chapters on Ellison's literary influences and offers a definitive overview of his early writings. It also provides an overview of Ellison's reception and reputation from his death in 1994 through 2020.
Author: Michael Germana Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190682086 Category : LITERARY CRITICISM Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
'Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist' elucidates the theory of temporality that binds Ellison's oeuvre together, and explains why race is a matter of time. Germana offers a wholesale reinterpretation of Ellison's corpus as well as an extension of Ellison's ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future.
Author: Bryan Crable Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 0813932165 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke focuses on the little-known but important friendship between two canonical American writers. The story of this fifty-year friendship, however, is more than literary biography; Bryan Crable argues that the Burke-Ellison relationship can be interpreted as a microcosm of the American "racial divide." Through examination of published writings and unpublished correspondence, he reconstructs the dialogue between Burke and Ellison about race that shaped some of their most important works, including Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and Ellison's Invisible Man. In addition, the book connects this dialogue to changes in American discourse about race. Crable shows that these two men were deeply connected, intellectually and personally, but the social division between white and black Americans produced hesitation, embarrassment, mystery, and estrangement where Ellison and Burke might otherwise have found unity. By using Ellison's nonfiction and Burke's rhetorical theory to articulate a new vocabulary of race, the author concludes not with a simplistic "healing" of the divide but with a challenge to embrace the responsibility inherent to our social order. American Literatures Initiative
Author: Adam Bradley Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300147147 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
Ralph Ellison may be the preeminent African-American author of the twentieth century, though he published only one novel, 1952’s Invisible Man. He enjoyed a highly successful career in American letters, publishing two collections of essays, teaching at several colleges and universities, and writing dozens of pieces for newspapers and magazines, yet Ellison never published the second novel he had been composing for more than forty years. A 1967 fire that destroyed some of his work accounts for only a small part of the novel’s fate; the rest is revealed in the thousands of pages he left behind after his death in 1994, many of them collected for the first time in the recently published Three Days Before the Shooting . . . . Ralph Ellison in Progress is the first book to survey the expansive geography of Ellison’s unfinished novel while re-imaging the more familiar, but often misunderstood, territory of Invisible Man. It works from the premise that understanding Ellison’s process of composition imparts important truths not only about the author himself but about race, writing, and American identity. Drawing on thousands of pages of Ellison’s journals, typescripts, computer drafts, and handwritten notes, many never before studied, Adam Bradley argues for a shift in scholarly emphasis that moves a greater share of the weight of Ellison’s literary legacy to the last forty years of his life and to the novel he left forever in progress.
Author: M. Cooper Harriss Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479823015 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
Examines the religious dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s concept of race Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man provides an unforgettable metaphor for what it means to be disregarded in society. While the term “invisibility” has become shorthand for all forms of marginalization, Ellison was primarily concerned with racial identity. M. Cooper Harriss argues that religion, too, remains relatively invisible within discussions of race and seeks to correct this through a close study of Ralph Ellison’s work. Harriss examines the religious and theological dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s concept of race through his evocative metaphor for the experience of blackness in America, and with an eye to uncovering previously unrecognized religious dynamics in Ellison’s life and work. Blending religious studies and theology, race theory, and fresh readings of African-American culture, Harriss draws on Ellison to create the concept of an “invisible theology,” and uses this concept as a basis for discussing religion and racial identity in contemporary American life. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology is the first book to focus on Ellison as a religious figure, and on the religious dynamics of his work. Harriss brings to light Ellison’s close friendship with theologian and literary critic Nathan A. Scott, Jr., and places Ellison in context with such legendary religious figures as Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Martin Luther King, Jr. He argues that historical legacies of invisible theology help us make sense of more recent issues like drone warfare and Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. Rich and innovative, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology will revolutionize the way we understand Ellison, the intellectual legacies of race, and the study of religion.
Author: Lucas E. Morel Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813182646 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 435
Book Description
“This superb [essay] collection enables readers of Invisible Man to appreciate the subtleties of its cultural and political commentary.” —Journal of American Studies An important collection of original essays that examine how Ellison’s landmark novel, Invisible Man (1952), addresses the social, cultural, political, economic, and racial contradictions of America. Commenting on the significance of Mark Twain’s writings, Ralph Ellison wrote that “a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.” Ellison believed it was the contradiction between America’s “noble ideals and the actualities of our conduct” that inspired the most profound literature?”the American novel at its best.” Drawing from the fields of literature, politics, law, and history, the contributors make visible the political and ethical terms of Invisible Man , while also illuminating Ellison’s understanding of democracy and art. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope uniquely demonstrates why Invisible Man stands as a premier literary meditation on American democracy. “Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding Ellison’s political thought.” —Lawrence Jackson, author of Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius “Outstanding. . . . Provides an interdisciplinary perspective of the politics of the book.” —Lexington Herald-Leader “These essays . . . demonstrate that a great work of art has the capacity to renew itself across generations.” —Pamela K. Jensen, Kenyon College “This careful study of Ellison’s great novel is highly recommended for all serious students of American and African American literature.” —African American Review
Author: John S. Wright
Author: John S. Wright
Author: Sterling Lecater Bland Jr.
Author: Michael D. Hill
Author: Paul Devlin
Author: Michael Germana
Author: Bryan Crable
Author: Gerald Lyn Early
Author: Adam Bradley
Author: M. Cooper Harriss
Author: Lucas E. Morel