Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison's acclaimed novel and his sole masterpiece, Invisible Man, is said to have been one of the world's greatest African-American novels. It is replete with discussions of racial discrimination, identity crisis and studies of systematic (racial) exploitations. The depictions are coalesced with existential accounts of bodily sensations and struggles with the self and the society. Nevertheless, a more profound look at the context and deep structure of this novel can reveal its ideological and social critiques as well. In fact, Ellison had arguably acquired a well-versed knowledge regarding power-struggles within social systems prior to the development of this lengthy novel. Such issues, then, appear to be among the sidelights of this work. Ellison explores many political discussions of his predecessors and sometimes prophetically unearths many to-be-discovered issues and theories, years before their actual coinages by theoreticians and sociologists like Michel Foucault. With this hindsight, this article tries to study the novel's oblique or direct references to social ideologies, hegemonies, and the theory of Panopticism at stake.

Two great pieces of American literature from the past century stand in stark contrast to each other on one important note: vision. While F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby" makes extensive use the symbol of eyes in its narrative, as well as the interpersonal relations of its characters and how they look at each other, Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" makes the lack of sight and recurrent blindness and invisibility a central and instructive theme. These works are each products of their time, and indeed products of class and race relations, however they speak to deeper, more fundamental forces in American culture. In using such accessible and salient themes in opposing ways, these two authors intentionally step back from their fictional narratives to give eloquent voice to the problems inherent in American ambitions and desires. A comparative analysis of the differing ways in which "The Great Gatsby" and "Invisible Man" explore the elemental sense of sight reveals that, unknowingly, but quite harmoniously, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison join hands across the decades to show us just how America lost—and perhaps continually loses—not only its sight, but also its vision.

This paper discusses the function of underground communities in the postmodernist novels Invisible Man and The Crying of Lot 49. While these novels appear different on the surface, there are a surprising number of themes which unite them. My central thesis explains that both the narrator of Invisible Man and Lot 49's Oedipa Maas are disadvantaged characters, due to either their race or gender, and their involvement in underground communities empowers them and gives them a new purpose.

Francis Fukuyama further emphasized how our economic status is intertwined with our dignity in chapter 9, ‘Invisible Man’. Accordingly, economist Robert Frank discussed how status is most often wanted for its relative value (Fukuyama, 2018). Meaning, our desire to obtain
material resources is not because of its absolute value, the depiction of our wealth, but rather to show our superiority to those around us lacking such things.

Like gender, power, and racial discourses, identity too, is socially constructed. Even though it originates naturally, it is seen to undergo a manufacturing to uphold itself. The present paper shall seek to study how Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), captures the 1930s Afro-American search for identity. Though it is the unnamed narrator, who grapples against various power blocks, it is essential to note that the powerful Black president, the White trustees, and the Brotherhood too, fight the same battle in a different way altogether. What is unique about the invisible man’s identity is his ceaseless struggle throughout the novel, only to be rendered invisible in the end. This, however, helps us interrogate if his fight is against the system, the power holders, or his own race that he identifies with. The text at hand shall be ‘reread’ using Stuart Hall’s concept of identity, who asserts that identity is not what we are, but rather what we become. This idea of “becoming rather than being” (1996) is central to Hall’s question of identity. The power forces and the exclusion of the Other helps construct or deconstruct (in case of the narrator) one’s identity. One must at the same time, relocate the identity of the narrator through that of Wells’ Griffin (The Invisible Man) to find if their quest for identities intersect and involve similar struggles or not. If identity is about becoming and “constructs us as subjects”, then is our true selfhood not an interpellation itself? These are some questions I intend to answer through the development of identity in the narrator in Ellison’s work.

This paper approaches the theme of human rights from the perspective of racism (social and political discrimination based on biological differences) and sexism (the discrimination of the woman based on the opinion that she is less able than the man).  Those were issues that engaged the greater attention of black writers of the mid-twentieth century, such as Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ralph Ellison.  From a survey of selected works by African-American writers of that period, the paper argues that the black population, while it hailed the structural racial reforms, was concerned that the legislative dismantling of segregative structures had not changed the fundamental discriminatory attitude of whites. It further shows that the black woman faced another kind of discrimination not only as a person of colour but also because of her gender; discrimination, sadly, even from her own black society.

"This paper will focus on the depiction of invisible form in two US films: Memoirs of an Invisible Man (John Carpenter, 1992) and Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven, 2000). Both works depict the passage into invisibility of their male subjects: in Memoirs, the invisible Nick Halloway (Chevy Chase) finds love whilst being sought by the CIA; in Hollow Man, the invisible Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) copes with a similar predicament by committing acts of sexual assault and murder.

The transgressive physical intercourse – both consensual and non-consensual – in these films brings questions of texture to the surface. Both films present the invisible bodies interacting with their visible surroundings through their manipulation of malleable forms, thus enabling an exaggerated form of what Laura Marks calls ‘haptic cinema’. But what of the texture of film itself? As with earlier cinematic depictions of invisible form, including Segundo de Chomón’s Le Voleur invisible (1909), Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933), and John McTiernan’s Predator (1987), the production of both Memoirs and Hollow Man represents significant developments in cinematic visual effects, and thus in the manipulation of the materiality of the medium. Specifically, both films contributed notably to the evolution of computer generated imagery, with Industrial Light and Magic’s innovative work on Memoirs, and, for Hollow Man, Sony’s ‘Digital Human Project’.

This presentation will utilise stills and moving-image clips to explore how, in these films, the perverse presence of invisible matter may be thought of in textural terms: the absence of image complicating conceptions of the materiality of the medium."

The class struggle is often correlated to the racial struggle as an apparent motif throughout Ellison's Invisible Man; Ellison critiques the capitalist system that promotes individualism and monetary gain over collective consciousness and communal strength. Organized action, protest and the critique on mechanized labour and capitalism are at the focal point of the novel and these tools are used in an attempt to elevate the Harlem community. First, this paper will look at the varying anti-capitalist images throughout the novel. Then, it looks at the characters Brockway and Rinehart who uphold the capitalist and white paradigm by reinforcing negative black stereotypes and precluding effective organization and action. Then, it will convey how Ras prophetically alluded to the malignant system of capitalism that sacrifices community for money; he links the futility of this system to the problematic dispersal of the black community. Last, the paper will contend that the overt theme and solution to this malignant system is effective organization (through oratory talent) and action against the paradigms that bar the community (whether working class or racially oppressed-the two often are analogous in this struggle). This imagery culminates within the figure Dupre, who is effectively taking organized action against the white racist and capitalist paradigms by using the rhetorical , organizational and intellectual tools that were gifted to him by speakers like the Narrator who are symbolic of the talented tenth. Often it is the talented tenth that are seen as uplifting the entire community , such as was considered the case in Harlem communities at the time Ellison wrote (through the foundational tools wrought on via leftist political ideology).

Original copy. March 2005

Explores how Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man" delineates a repeated pattern by the invisible man, whereby he associates with grandiose people of some sort of esteem, and ends up actually being seen by them in a way he rather favours. These figures underestimate him at first, look past him, but eventually draw focus, something they are made out as only doing by his demonstrating himself distinct either as threat or prize. Garnering this acquisition, and then leaving to obtain it from others still foreign to penetrating through to something ostensibly core, something ostensibly individualized, distinct and worthy, about him, is his regular life pattern. He's delineated as a master at making those with a glassy eye, a glassy gaze, towards him, attend to him with some real clarity, some valid registration of the actual person before them.

This paper explores the trajectories of black manhood and fatherhood in
modern and contemporary American literature and literary criticism and
contemplates a possible space for “good” black fathers. As we investigate how
earlier discourses and discussions on black manhood have been constructed,
and have remained and developed, there certainly is a change or progress in
reading and creating different types of representations of black men—without
focusing too much on body and sexuality—in American literature and
literary criticism, starting from a ragged image considered problematic,
violent, dangerous, or bereft, and under institutionalized destitution. This
denigration of the black male has intensified and solidified myths of the
black family—a black matriarchal family that lacks a desirable father figure,
consequently leading to the effeminized, castrated black masculine presence in
their communities—but has come to be questioned, leading to a somewhat
hopeful, positive, and even philosophical depiction by questioning the core of
defining good and bad under the dire circumstances within which African
American men find themselves. By scrutinizing innocuous, caregiving father
figures dwelling at home in African American novels, this paper looks back
at how literary criticism and literature itself have exercised creative power in
order to give birth to the “good” black men, who were deemed nonexistent
or insufficient before, through re-reading, re-tracing, and re-looking at black
fathers/men in novels written by renowned literary figures from Richard Wright,
Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to contemporary—and
relatively young—authors such as Leonard Pitts Jr. and Bernice L. McFadden.

This is a short essay that I had written as a class assignment.  The professor refused to grade it saying that I was, "To involved in the paper".  I suspect that she was offended, taking it personal because she is white.  If she cared to actually read the entire papaer she would have seen that it is not an attack on white people.

The first 'unified field theory' of multicultural literature, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism is a literary history of how we arrived at our current paradigm of writing, reading and teaching multicultural literature in the United States. It hypothesizes a three-phase development for multicultural literature from the 1920s to the 1980s, uncovering the largely unacknowledged role that social science ideas played in nourishing the politics and forms of the most canonical writers in the African American, Asian American, Mexican American and Native American traditions. A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism challenges the critical consensuses on the four traditions that treat each in terms of separate histories, a critical practice that has obscured the parallel phases of each tradition and the common cultural politics that generated multiculturalism's rupture with the non-pluralist literary politics that came before it.

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man," as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her "Terrible Honesty" argues 20s modern's did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross; body-oppressive and engulfing.

February 2006

Invisible Man, the invisible man repeatedly draws our attention to how he captures the attention of discerning individuals. Supposedly, this is not the sort of attention he craves. What he really wants, he tells us, is for others to take an interest in him, but not only so to better discern if he is useful or a threat. Unfortunately, "[n]o one really wished to hear what [he] [.. .] called himself" (573). We have reason to believe, however, that the attention he does receive is exactly the sort he craves-or, rather, the sort he can enjoy and still live with. For not only does he consistently show in his account that he attends to whether or not people take "special" (301) notice of him, he shows he prefers they not interact with him in a manner that makes it difficult to at some point leave them behind. When the invisible man drives Mr. Norton about town, he remembers an experience from his early school years that influenced him profoundly. He recalls having seen photographs of black men and women who appeared "almost without individuality, a black mob," along with "striking" white people who possessed "clear [.. .] features" (39). Believing his association with the Founder's college has already provided him with some status, he obviously hopes that the distinguished white man, Mr. Norton, will reinforce his preferred sense of himself as "not just another face in the crowd." However, Mr. Norton makes him feel as he wasn't actually "seen" by him, that is, as if Mr. Norton saw "only [his] [.. .] surroundings, [him]self, or figments of [his] [.. .] imagination-indeed, everything and anything except [the invisible man]" (3). He says things which seem to suggest that the invisible man matters to him, that his particular identity, who he is and who he will become, is important to him. For example, Mr. Norton says that his own "fate" (44) depends upon the nature of the invisible man's progress through life. He also suggests that an intimate connection exists between the two of them-"So you see, young man, you are involved in my life quite intimately, even though you've never seen me before" (43). However, the invisible man detects something about the way they are interacting which has him doubt how much he actually does mean to him. He gauges that Mr. Norton talks to him "like someone in a book" (44) would, and if he means here that Mr. Norton is not speaking to him in a manner which suggests that specific context he is in, the specific person he is talking to, interest or affect him enough to determine his delivery, he is exactly right.

March 2005

Jonathan Law recently passed his PhD with no corrections, titled 'Materialising the Unseen: The Multisensory Cinema of the Invisible Body'. His examiners were Professor Jan Baetens (University of Leuven, Belgium) and Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald (University of Kent).

Jonathan was in receipt of the School of Arts Postgraduate Research Scholarship at University of Kent.

Scanned original copy. February 2006.

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man," as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her "Terrible Honesty" argues 20s modern's did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross; body-oppressive and engulfing.

Realisme masih dipertahankan dalam bentuk fiksi Amerika setelah PDII. Beberapa tema yang sering muncul pada karya fiksi di era postmodernism yaitu; karya sastranya menolak generalisasi, bersifat realism, mempermasalahkan identitas, Penggunaan bahasa yang unik, dan alam metafisik (Magic, Spiritual, Soul, Misitis). Novel Invisible Man mengeksplorasi tema manusia mencari identitas dan tempat di masyarakat. Novel ini berlatarkan New York pada tahun 1930. Tokoh utama dari novel ini adalah seorang pria berkulit hitam anonimus yang tinggal di New York. Novel dibuka dengan prolog dari sang tokoh utama yang menamakan dirinya sebagai invisible man.

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Insights-Access-Card-Invisible/dp/1682179192/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=invisible+man+critical+insights&qid=1570813114&sr=8-1

Like all the volumes in the Critical Insights series, this one is divided into three main parts. The first is a collection of four Critical Contexts essays, intended to treat the novel (1) from a historical vantage point, (2) in terms of its critical reception, (3) using a specific critical lens, and (4) comparing and contrasting it with another important work. The Critical Contexts essays are followed by ten Critical Readings, which are designed to offer a kaleidoscope of different ways of approaching Ellison's book. The book concludes with a Resources section consisting mainly of a chronology and both primary and secondary bibliographies. The book begins with a flagship essay by Patrice Rankine, a distinguished scholar who has been studying Ellison's works for many decades. In fact, his essay takes the form of a self-interview, in which he asks and answers a series of questions about when, where, how, and especially why he came to find the book so intriguing. Rankine explores the motifs and approaches that made Invisible Man "a novel that America could not ignore, and should not, even into the 21st century." He argues that "approaches rooted in literary allusion and borrowings, alongside Ellison's interest in jazz and blues, color the novel in unique, unexpected ways. The same characteristics that raised Invisible Man to 'classic' heights," he contends, "are the ones that critics fault. Invisible Man deserves our attention because many of the social ills to which it points are still with us." Rankine's essay is followed by a brief biography of Ellison by Kelley Jeans, which lays out the main facts of the author's life, especially in the period before and during the first publication of Invisible Man. Critical Contexts In the first of the Critical Contexts essays, Phill Johnson looks at Ellison's novel from an intriguing historical perspective. He recounts, more thoroughly than has ever been done before, the various attempts that have been made to challenge and even to ban the book, especially from high school classrooms. His findings reveal that it has usually been the sexual rather than the racial aspects of the book that have provoked the most controversy. "Ironically," he writes, "when the book has been objected to on racial grounds, the main complaint seems to have involved its use of "the 'n' word" and other, similarly insensitive language." Paradoxically, then, Invisible Man "-which is generally perceived as an indictment of racism-has occasionally been seen as racist itself because it honestly presents the ways racists actually speak." Johnson notes that attempts "to ban Invisible Man can be traced over many decades, including into very recent times." Most of those attempts ultimately failed and, like most attempts at censorship, actually stimulated interest in the book.

This paper explores the trajectories of black manhood and fatherhood in modern and contemporary American literature and literary criticism and contemplates a possible space for “good” black fathers. As we investigate how earlier discourses and discussions on black manhood have been constructed, and have remained and developed, there certainly is a change or progress in reading and creating different types of representations of black men — without focusing too much on body and sexuality — in American literature and literary criticism, starting from a ragged image considered problematic, violent, dangerous, or bereft, and under institutionalized destitution. This denigration of the black male has intensified and solidified myths of the black family — a black matriarchal family that lacks a desirable father figure, consequently leading to the effeminized, castrated black masculine presence in their communities — but has come to be questioned, leading to a somewhat hopeful, positive, and even philosophical depiction by questioning the core of defining good and bad under the dire circumstances within which African American men find themselves. By scrutinizing innocuous, caregiving father figures dwelling at home in African American novels, this paper looks back at how literary criticism and literature itself have exercised creative power in order to give birth to the “good” black men, who were deemed nonexistent or insufficient before, through re-reading, re-tracing, and re-looking at black fathers/men in novels written by renowned literary figures from Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to contemporary — and relatively young — authors such as Leonard Pitts Jr. and Bernice L. McFadden.