Shadowing Ralph Ellison (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) - Hardcover

John S. Wright

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578068509 ISBN 13: 9781578068500

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2006

Synopsis

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.

John Wright is associate professor of African American and African studies and English at the University of Minnesota and is faculty scholar for the Archie Givens, Sr., Collection of African American Literature and Life. He coedited, with Michael S. Harper, A Ralph Ellison Festival (a special volume of the Carleton Miscellany).

About this title

About the Author

John Wright is associate professor of African American & African studies, and English, at the University of Minnesota, and is faculty scholar for the Archie Givens, Sr., Collection of African American Literature and Life. He co-edited, with Michael S. Harper, A Ralph Ellison Festival (a special volume of the Carleton Miscellany).

From the Inside Flap

A critical study of the writings and thought of the American literary genius and his blues and jazz derived "vernacular" aesthetic

Reviews

Ellison's Invisible Man, published in 1952, transformed American literature and set the stage for an ongoing debate in black literature, where he was alternately lionized and criticized for his views on the philosophical place of a black man in America. Ellison would spend 40 years living up to the promise of his novel and living down attacks by the radical generation of the black-power movement. Wright, an African American studies scholar, exuberantly explores the philosophical and aesthetic influences behind Ellison's creative development before examining how Invisible Man fit into the sociological and cultural framework of the 1950s and later. Wright also analyzes Ellison's writing techniques and his debate with other writers about the prospect of the novel as a literary form, as well as Ellison's essays during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. In a short epilogue, Wright examines questions regarding Ellison's literary legacy and his uncompleted second novel. Although the book is a bit academic, fans and scholars of Ellison will appreciate this probing examination of his body of work. Vanessa Bush
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Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1578068509
• ISBN 13: 9781578068500
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 269