A Fundamentally American Text

Ellison: Invisible Man

In this course, Prof. James Haile III (University of Rhode Island) explores Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In the first lecture, we introduce the text as a novel about America and American identity at a transitional moment between the pre-modern and modern world. In the three lectures after that, we introduce the existential theory that emerges from Invisible, focusing in particular on the concept of ‘positive negation’ and Ellison’s concept of how history moves – ‘not like an arrow, but a boomerang’, i.e. constantly looping back on itself, with no progression whatsoever. In the four lectures after that, we look at several seminal moments in the novel that give colour to Ellison’s existential theory, including: (i) the meeting between Mr. Norton and Jim Trueblood; (ii) the narrator’s first meeting with the Vet; (iii) the narrator’s second meeting with the Vet and the eviction scene; (iv) the death of Clifton; and (v) the narrator’s meeting with the zoot-suiters in the subway. In the penultimate lecture, we turn to the final pages of the novel to see what, if anything, the narrator has learned from experiences, before moving on in the final lecture to provide a couple of reading suggestions … and a listening suggestion.

A Fundamentally American Text

In this lecture, we think about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a fundamentally American text, focusing in particular on: (i) the extent to which the novel epitomises the historical moment in which it was written; (ii) the shift in the global balance of power following the Second World War: the decline of Western Europe and the emergence of the United States as global superpower; (iii) the shift in the dominant philosophical outlook following the Second World War: the decline of European rationalism and the emergence of American pragmatism; (iv) Ellison’s view that these global shifts are exemplified by the experience of African-Americans; (iv) the importance of figures such as Louis Armstrong (1901-71) in representing the combination of something European (the trumpet) and something African (syncopated rhythm) to create something uniquely American (jazz); (v) the extent to which Invisible Man sees itself has blending European and African sensibilities to create a fundamentally American text.