The mind seems (“seems,” for all is obscure that takes place in the mind) to go through two processes in reading. One might be called the actual reading; the other the after reading.

But it is undoubted that these hybrid books, these warehouses and depositories of facts, play a great part in resting the brain and restoring its zest of imagination. The work of building up a life for oneself from skulls, thimbles, scissors, and sonnets stimulates our interest in creation and rouses our wish to see the work beautifully and powerfully done by a Flaubert or a Tolstoi. Moreover, however interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.

A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets, are given us, and we have to create, to combine, to put these incongruous things together. There is, too, a quality in facts, an emotion which comes from knowing that men and women actually did and suffered these things, which only the greatest novelists can surpass.

But the more exciting the book, the more danger we run of over-reading. The symptoms are familiar. Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and cannot attend. The highest flights of Shakespeare and Milton become intolerable. And we say to ourselves—is Keats a fool or am I?—a painful question, a question, moreover, that need not be asked if we realized how great a part the art of not reading plays in the art of reading. To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power.

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them.

if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

For though reading seems so simple—a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it.

a room of their own

Why focus on process? A cynical way to think about it is that documenting the writing process makes it harder for students to cheat. There are lots of polished 5-page essays out there to imitate, but fewer templates that trace the evolution of an idea from an initial insight, through second thoughts, to dialectical final draft.

that annoying thesis

As Marc Watkins has recently noted, patching pedagogy with surveillance is a cure worse than the disease.)

The verb “rehearse” may sound dismissive, but I don’t mean this dismissively. It can have real value to walk in the shoes of past generations. Sometimes ontogeny does need to recapitulate phylogeny, and we should keep asking students to do that, occasionally — even if they have to do it with pencil on paper.

But if the goal of education is actually to learn new things — and we’re learning those things along with our students — then simulating the process is not something to fear.

he expected it would be hard for students to answer his assignments using AI

In my essay, then,

Grassroots

deep time”

Invisible man’s encounter with Sybil signals the penultimate moment of revelation that not only drives the protagonist underground, but also prompts his desire to articulate the double-consciousness that emerges from epistemological blindness. The two participate in a flirtation that depends on their symbolic statuses – “just the type of misunderstood married woman” and “Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are possible” (515, 517). Plotting revenge on the Brotherhood, the narrator intends to seduce the lonely woman in order to secure restricted information to which her husband, George, has access. At the same time, Sybil encourages the encounter so that she can confirm her fantasy of a black rapist. In their interaction invisible man finally sees a symbolic and “a very revolting ritual” and he asks whether Sybil’s face displays “horror” or “innocence,” an ambivalence that emerges from the “obscene scheme of the evening” (517). His question reveals his desire for answers, not sex. Now, near the end of his journey, he sees a woman with whom he communicates; or, at least, she communicates something to him. Her articulation of the contours and the logic of negation prompts the protagonist to think; his next step requires action.

At the Battle Royal and in his “blind terror” (21), a metaphor of proliferating invisibility, invisible man sees only the image of a “magnificent blonde,” her image constructed in the social imaginary. While he has not yet developed insight, he begins to learn its lessons. In this scene that frames the entire novel, the woman – also nameless and “stark naked” – stands before the protagonist, the fearful black boys, and the town’s most respected white men. The novel’s description frames her visually, and her subjectivity first appears through the male eyes that look at her body. Her humanity seems to disappear as her body submits to the voyeuristic gaze that renders her a pornographic sex object. She is invisible. Her manipulated image presents stereotypes of truth and social authority that rationalize domination over women and black people. For the narrator, however, this woman prompts him to see and feel ambivalence: “I wanted at one and the same time to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed on her belly her thighs formed a capital V” (19). Even as the woman’s presence provokes a visceral response, the protagonist’s engagement calls attention to her visual and revelatory significance. For instance, the V of the woman’s thighs juxtaposed with the American flag signals democratic victory. As Ellison began writing Invisible Man at the end of World War II, the United States had defeated totalitarian threats against global humanity. This victory not only positioned the nation as the world’s leading democracy, it also promised integration, an honest racial equality that would finally realize the most sacred principles of American freedom. Yet, at the same time, the V between the woman’s thighs also represents her gender difference and it reminds the protagonist of women’s unequal status. Looking past the symbolic surface of the “magnificent blonde,” Invisible Man begins to realize that no victory has been won. Neither the woman nor the man can rely on the national symbols that should, in actuality, indicate their freedoms.

The narrator’s underground appropriation of a “Monopolated Light & Power” enacts his dissent from their totalizing control. By avoiding having to pay for the 1,369 lightbulbs that illuminate his hole, the invisible man seeks an independent source of insight.

In 1953, one year after the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hugh Hefner launched his men’s magazine, Playboy. The magazine’s centerfold featured a nude Marilyn Monroe posed against a striking red velvet curtain. The photograph was taken in 1949 as Ellison was working diligently on the novel, and it became a quintessential example of American femininity, an icon of American cultural history. As a photographer, art student, and collector of painting and portraiture, Ellison understood the power of visual images. He liked to look at pictures. In his novel, Ellison describes a nude woman that seems to invoke the Playboy image: “the red robe swept aside like a veil, and I went breathless at the petite and generously curved nude, framed delicate and firm in the glass.”(1) This nameless woman, “acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility” (Invisible 409), has a sexual affair with the protagonist and she appears in the novel just as invisible man confronts “The Woman Question.” Ellison’s artful description of the woman’s symbolic role, like Monroe’s pose, suggests complicity in a well-known and longstanding iconography of female difference and sexual objectification that critics have argued amounts to nothing more than a literary pinup. Ellison also describes the woman as framed by “a life-sized painting, a nude, a pink Renoir,” and the narrator sees her nakedness haunted by a shadow. The painting emphasizes the very constructedness of gender difference. As a double, it offers a visual and life-sized reference to the history of female objectification so that Ellison’s readers can look at the woman and see the “mirrors of hard, distorting glass” (3) that distort her humanity. The scene provokes in invisible man the sense of “a poignancy,” something that forces him to question his reality – “[i]t was like a dream interval” – and most importantly, to question his assumption that invisibility is exclusive to black men (416-17). Here, both the narrator and the woman appear as nameless types. Their mutual and their individual challenge is to achieve an identity, one independent of the stereotypical images that conceal the truth.

Invisible man’s encounter with Sybil signals the penultimate moment of revelation that not only drives the protagonist underground, but also prompts his desire to articulate the double-consciousness that emerges from epistemological blindness. The two participate in a flirtation that depends on their symbolic statuses – “just the type of misunderstood married woman” and “Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are possible” (515, 517). Plotting revenge on the Brotherhood, the narrator intends to seduce the lonely woman in order to secure restricted information to which her husband, George, has access. At the same time, Sybil encourages the encounter so that she can confirm her fantasy of a black rapist. In their interaction invisible man finally sees a symbolic and “a very revolting ritual” and he asks whether Sybil’s face displays “horror” or “innocence,” an ambivalence that emerges from the “obscene scheme of the evening” (517). His question reveals his desire for answers, not sex. Now, near the end of his journey, he sees a woman with whom he communicates; or, at least, she communicates something to him. Her articulation of the contours and the logic of negation prompts the protagonist to think; his next step requires action.

At the Battle Royal and in his “blind terror” (21), a metaphor of proliferating invisibility, invisible man sees only the image of a “magnificent blonde,” her image constructed in the social imaginary. While he has not yet developed insight, he begins to learn its lessons. In this scene that frames the entire novel, the woman – also nameless and “stark naked” – stands before the protagonist, the fearful black boys, and the town’s most respected white men. The novel’s description frames her visually, and her subjectivity first appears through the male eyes that look at her body. Her humanity seems to disappear as her body submits to the voyeuristic gaze that renders her a pornographic sex object. She is invisible. Her manipulated image presents stereotypes of truth and social authority that rationalize domination over women and black people. For the narrator, however, this woman prompts him to see and feel ambivalence: “I wanted at one and the same time to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed on her belly her thighs formed a capital V” (19). Even as the woman’s presence provokes a visceral response, the protagonist’s engagement calls attention to her visual and revelatory significance. For instance, the V of the woman’s thighs juxtaposed with the American flag signals democratic victory. As Ellison began writing Invisible Man at the end of World War II, the United States had defeated totalitarian threats against global humanity. This victory not only positioned the nation as the world’s leading democracy, it also promised integration, an honest racial equality that would finally realize the most sacred principles of American freedom. Yet, at the same time, the V between the woman’s thighs also represents her gender difference and it reminds the protagonist of women’s unequal status. Looking past the symbolic surface of the “magnificent blonde,” Invisible Man begins to realize that no victory has been won. Neither the woman nor the man can rely on the national symbols that should, in actuality, indicate their freedoms.

The narrator’s underground appropriation of a “Monopolated Light & Power” enacts his dissent from their totalizing control. By avoiding having to pay for the 1,369 lightbulbs that illuminate his hole, the invisible man seeks an independent source of insight.

In 1953, one year after the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hugh Hefner launched his men’s magazine, Playboy. The magazine’s centerfold featured a nude Marilyn Monroe posed against a striking red velvet curtain. The photograph was taken in 1949 as Ellison was working diligently on the novel, and it became a quintessential example of American femininity, an icon of American cultural history. As a photographer, art student, and collector of painting and portraiture, Ellison understood the power of visual images. He liked to look at pictures. In his novel, Ellison describes a nude woman that seems to invoke the Playboy image: “the red robe swept aside like a veil, and I went breathless at the petite and generously curved nude, framed delicate and firm in the glass.”(1) This nameless woman, “acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility” (Invisible 409), has a sexual affair with the protagonist and she appears in the novel just as invisible man confronts “The Woman Question.” Ellison’s artful description of the woman’s symbolic role, like Monroe’s pose, suggests complicity in a well-known and longstanding iconography of female difference and sexual objectification that critics have argued amounts to nothing more than a literary pinup. Ellison also describes the woman as framed by “a life-sized painting, a nude, a pink Renoir,” and the narrator sees her nakedness haunted by a shadow. The painting emphasizes the very constructedness of gender difference. As a double, it offers a visual and life-sized reference to the history of female objectification so that Ellison’s readers can look at the woman and see the “mirrors of hard, distorting glass” (3) that distort her humanity. The scene provokes in invisible man the sense of “a poignancy,” something that forces him to question his reality – “[i]t was like a dream interval” – and most importantly, to question his assumption that invisibility is exclusive to black men (416-17). Here, both the narrator and the woman appear as nameless types. Their mutual and their individual challenge is to achieve an identity, one independent of the stereotypical images that conceal the truth.

Invisible man’s encounter with Sybil signals the penultimate moment of revelation that not only drives the protagonist underground, but also prompts his desire to articulate the double-consciousness that emerges from epistemological blindness. The two participate in a flirtation that depends on their symbolic statuses – “just the type of misunderstood married woman” and “Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are possible” (515, 517). Plotting revenge on the Brotherhood, the narrator intends to seduce the lonely woman in order to secure restricted information to which her husband, George, has access. At the same time, Sybil encourages the encounter so that she can confirm her fantasy of a black rapist. In their interaction invisible man finally sees a symbolic and “a very revolting ritual” and he asks whether Sybil’s face displays “horror” or “innocence,” an ambivalence that emerges from the “obscene scheme of the evening” (517). His question reveals his desire for answers, not sex. Now, near the end of his journey, he sees a woman with whom he communicates; or, at least, she communicates something to him. Her articulation of the contours and the logic of negation prompts the protagonist to think; his next step requires action.

At the Battle Royal and in his “blind terror” (21), a metaphor of proliferating invisibility, invisible man sees only the image of a “magnificent blonde,” her image constructed in the social imaginary. While he has not yet developed insight, he begins to learn its lessons. In this scene that frames the entire novel, the woman – also nameless and “stark naked” – stands before the protagonist, the fearful black boys, and the town’s most respected white men. The novel’s description frames her visually, and her subjectivity first appears through the male eyes that look at her body. Her humanity seems to disappear as her body submits to the voyeuristic gaze that renders her a pornographic sex object. She is invisible. Her manipulated image presents stereotypes of truth and social authority that rationalize domination over women and black people. For the narrator, however, this woman prompts him to see and feel ambivalence: “I wanted at one and the same time to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed on her belly her thighs formed a capital V” (19). Even as the woman’s presence provokes a visceral response, the protagonist’s engagement calls attention to her visual and revelatory significance. For instance, the V of the woman’s thighs juxtaposed with the American flag signals democratic victory. As Ellison began writing Invisible Man at the end of World War II, the United States had defeated totalitarian threats against global humanity. This victory not only positioned the nation as the world’s leading democracy, it also promised integration, an honest racial equality that would finally realize the most sacred principles of American freedom. Yet, at the same time, the V between the woman’s thighs also represents her gender difference and it reminds the protagonist of women’s unequal status. Looking past the symbolic surface of the “magnificent blonde,” Invisible Man begins to realize that no victory has been won. Neither the woman nor the man can rely on the national symbols that should, in actuality, indicate their freedoms.

The narrator’s underground appropriation of a “Monopolated Light & Power” enacts his dissent from their totalizing control. By avoiding having to pay for the 1,369 lightbulbs that illuminate his hole, the invisible man seeks an independent source of insight.

In 1953, one year after the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hugh Hefner launched his men’s magazine, Playboy. The magazine’s centerfold featured a nude Marilyn Monroe posed against a striking red velvet curtain. The photograph was taken in 1949 as Ellison was working diligently on the novel, and it became a quintessential example of American femininity, an icon of American cultural history. As a photographer, art student, and collector of painting and portraiture, Ellison understood the power of visual images. He liked to look at pictures. In his novel, Ellison describes a nude woman that seems to invoke the Playboy image: “the red robe swept aside like a veil, and I went breathless at the petite and generously curved nude, framed delicate and firm in the glass.”(1) This nameless woman, “acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility” (Invisible 409), has a sexual affair with the protagonist and she appears in the novel just as invisible man confronts “The Woman Question.” Ellison’s artful description of the woman’s symbolic role, like Monroe’s pose, suggests complicity in a well-known and longstanding iconography of female difference and sexual objectification that critics have argued amounts to nothing more than a literary pinup. Ellison also describes the woman as framed by “a life-sized painting, a nude, a pink Renoir,” and the narrator sees her nakedness haunted by a shadow. The painting emphasizes the very constructedness of gender difference. As a double, it offers a visual and life-sized reference to the history of female objectification so that Ellison’s readers can look at the woman and see the “mirrors of hard, distorting glass” (3) that distort her humanity. The scene provokes in invisible man the sense of “a poignancy,” something that forces him to question his reality – “[i]t was like a dream interval” – and most importantly, to question his assumption that invisibility is exclusive to black men (416-17). Here, both the narrator and the woman appear as nameless types. Their mutual and their individual challenge is to achieve an identity, one independent of the stereotypical images that conceal the truth.

Invisible man’s encounter with Sybil signals the penultimate moment of revelation that not only drives the protagonist underground, but also prompts his desire to articulate the double-consciousness that emerges from epistemological blindness. The two participate in a flirtation that depends on their symbolic statuses – “just the type of misunderstood married woman” and “Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are possible” (515, 517). Plotting revenge on the Brotherhood, the narrator intends to seduce the lonely woman in order to secure restricted information to which her husband, George, has access. At the same time, Sybil encourages the encounter so that she can confirm her fantasy of a black rapist. In their interaction invisible man finally sees a symbolic and “a very revolting ritual” and he asks whether Sybil’s face displays “horror” or “innocence,” an ambivalence that emerges from the “obscene scheme of the evening” (517). His question reveals his desire for answers, not sex. Now, near the end of his journey, he sees a woman with whom he communicates; or, at least, she communicates something to him. Her articulation of the contours and the logic of negation prompts the protagonist to think; his next step requires action.

At the Battle Royal and in his “blind terror” (21), a metaphor of proliferating invisibility, invisible man sees only the image of a “magnificent blonde,” her image constructed in the social imaginary. While he has not yet developed insight, he begins to learn its lessons. In this scene that frames the entire novel, the woman – also nameless and “stark naked” – stands before the protagonist, the fearful black boys, and the town’s most respected white men. The novel’s description frames her visually, and her subjectivity first appears through the male eyes that look at her body. Her humanity seems to disappear as her body submits to the voyeuristic gaze that renders her a pornographic sex object. She is invisible. Her manipulated image presents stereotypes of truth and social authority that rationalize domination over women and black people. For the narrator, however, this woman prompts him to see and feel ambivalence: “I wanted at one and the same time to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed on her belly her thighs formed a capital V” (19). Even as the woman’s presence provokes a visceral response, the protagonist’s engagement calls attention to her visual and revelatory significance. For instance, the V of the woman’s thighs juxtaposed with the American flag signals democratic victory. As Ellison began writing Invisible Man at the end of World War II, the United States had defeated totalitarian threats against global humanity. This victory not only positioned the nation as the world’s leading democracy, it also promised integration, an honest racial equality that would finally realize the most sacred principles of American freedom. Yet, at the same time, the V between the woman’s thighs also represents her gender difference and it reminds the protagonist of women’s unequal status. Looking past the symbolic surface of the “magnificent blonde,” Invisible Man begins to realize that no victory has been won. Neither the woman nor the man can rely on the national symbols that should, in actuality, indicate their freedoms.

The narrator’s underground appropriation of a “Monopolated Light & Power” enacts his dissent from their totalizing control. By avoiding having to pay for the 1,369 lightbulbs that illuminate his hole, the invisible man seeks an independent source of insight.

In 1953, one year after the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hugh Hefner launched his men’s magazine, Playboy. The magazine’s centerfold featured a nude Marilyn Monroe posed against a striking red velvet curtain. The photograph was taken in 1949 as Ellison was working diligently on the novel, and it became a quintessential example of American femininity, an icon of American cultural history. As a photographer, art student, and collector of painting and portraiture, Ellison understood the power of visual images. He liked to look at pictures. In his novel, Ellison describes a nude woman that seems to invoke the Playboy image: “the red robe swept aside like a veil, and I went breathless at the petite and generously curved nude, framed delicate and firm in the glass.”(1) This nameless woman, “acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility” (Invisible 409), has a sexual affair with the protagonist and she appears in the novel just as invisible man confronts “The Woman Question.” Ellison’s artful description of the woman’s symbolic role, like Monroe’s pose, suggests complicity in a well-known and longstanding iconography of female difference and sexual objectification that critics have argued amounts to nothing more than a literary pinup. Ellison also describes the woman as framed by “a life-sized painting, a nude, a pink Renoir,” and the narrator sees her nakedness haunted by a shadow. The painting emphasizes the very constructedness of gender difference. As a double, it offers a visual and life-sized reference to the history of female objectification so that Ellison’s readers can look at the woman and see the “mirrors of hard, distorting glass” (3) that distort her humanity. The scene provokes in invisible man the sense of “a poignancy,” something that forces him to question his reality – “[i]t was like a dream interval” – and most importantly, to question his assumption that invisibility is exclusive to black men (416-17). Here, both the narrator and the woman appear as nameless types. Their mutual and their individual challenge is to achieve an identity, one independent of the stereotypical images that conceal the truth.

At these points, the improvising soloist (usually singular) fills the otherwise empty sonic space with dramatic solo obligatti

Ellison beautifully employs color and light symbolism in Invisible Man through the “battle royal” to argue the ways in which the white race makes the black race invisible and vulnerable. What’s admirable about this horrific opening chapter is its unexpected nature. Ellison’s protagonist only participates in the “battle royal” on a whim before giving his speech and has no idea the extent of violence and racist slurs he will have to endure in it. The black race, though blindfolded by white cloths, must somehow also always keep an eye open to the racism and inhumanity waiting behind the grey-colored wall.

All ten of us… [were] blindfolded with broad bands of white cloth… Quite a struggle was going on. Chairs were being kicked about and… voices grunt[ed] as with a terrific effort. I wanted to see… more desperately than ever before… when I raised my gloved hands to push the layers of white aside a voice yelled, “Oh no you don’t black bastard! Leave that alone” (Ellison 21-22)! 

is akin to a concept described in “The Fact of Blackness,” the fifth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

Comparatively, the men’s smoke fogs the room into a haze so they literally cannot see the boys. 

Cigars are an important symbol of light

Invisible Man‘s significant first chapter employs color and light symbolism during the “battle royal” to argue that the black race is invisible to the white race which causes a vulnerability in the former.

No Vision or Visibility for the Invisible Man

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,

It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one,

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question

And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?

Gentle Reader

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism

He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design.

Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.

There is a property in the horizon

Standing on the bare ground

buried

Butler’s example of drag is that this particular art subverts the inner and outer binary and mocks the notion of what it means to be a “true” man or a “true” woman or even having a “true” gender. Drag allows the imitating of gender and reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as well as it’s continuation in society. The parodic performance exposes the possibility for continuous resignification when original markers are put into a new context such as drag. The originality of this notion is then challenged and questioned if bodies are the boundaries. Butler uses the exemplification of drag to indicate the gendered self is always only a surface presentation that is achieved through social means of repetition.

Butler utilizes the culture and lifestyle of drag queens in order to further prove their point of a performative gender. Drawing from “Paris Is Burning” the 1990 documentary of drag and queer culture, a large part of the drag culture were the ball circuits. These balls would have categories in which people could compete in, where one of the categories was “realness”.

Butler builds upon Foucault again to argue that the self is constructed outside of the body, hence the soul is never preexistent as it is presented in Western culture. Instead, the subject is defined by the actions being made by the body. Butler understands that social norms which are built on fiction and normative enforced ideals prioritize political rules and disciplinary practices which assist in producing subjects.

Butler builds on Foucault (who is the go to guy which many gender studies theorists turn to) and his claim that “the body is a plane of inscription”. From what we know about his work from “The History of Sexuality” it is apparent how normative and juridical powers can mold and form impressions onto bodies.

This is problematic because it enable people to police another person’s gender identity, sexual orientation, gender, and validate/invalidate their own experiences.

In “Gender Trouble”, Judith Butler focuses on the concepts of gender identities between gender and sex. In this exploration, Butler introduces the notion of gender as performative. To be performative, means a production of series of effects that consolidate an impression. To Butler, gender is a phenomenon where we as people perform gender constantly through what we wear, our posture, mannerisms, utterances, etc. Performative gender is produced socially through repetition. Butler stands to believe that no one is born with a gender but performs it, once they are born in a world that has already predestined their gender for them.

Nice Girls Don’t Wear Cha Cha Heels

The audiobooks have beautiful narration and some background sound, but there is no text except what is on the book’s cover. It will ultimately be up to the publishers to decide if they want to include text, but for young children text is an invaluable tool in reading comprehension. Text helps children associate words with sounds and should be included with all audiobooks

here is some music and sound effects throughout, but it is mostly the narrator speaking. StoryNory does not offer text for this particular story.

And when children played with Teddy Ruxpin, they sat down quietly and listened. This may sound familiar to parents who give their children their smartphones to play with to have some brief moments of peace.

The sounds would be connected to the story itself. For instance Tinkerbell would chime in Peter Pan, and a jungle bird trilling in The Jungle Book.

Orson Welles adapted Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince (Decca, 1946), and narrated it alongside Bing Crosb

frist century

see how the pages were sleeves to hold the records.   

Oral tradition is the original storytelling

in the case of Teddy Ruxpin

but retained several features from previous formats

examines the history of children’s audiobooks and considers its previous formats to determine what the future of children’s audiobooks

always forces us to imagine analogous genres

Within the first pages of the 1952 novel Invisible Man Ralph Ellison’s narrator relates Louis Armstrong’s music to his own desires and self-conceptions.

discourse on the Text should itself be only text, research, textual activity

This is a consequence of the fact that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied with a meta- linguistic exposition

The Text is a little like a score of this new kind: it solicits from the reader a practical collaboration.

“Playing” must be taken here in all the polysemy of the term: the text itself “plays” (like a door that “plays” back and forth on its hinges; like a fishing rod in which there is some “play”); and the reader plays twice over: he plays at the Text (ludic meaning), he seeks a practice which reproduces it; but, so that this practice is not reduced to a passive, interior mimesis (the Text being precisely what resists this reduction), he plays the Text

Rhetoric, the great literary code of that time, taught writing (even if what was ordinarily produced were discourses, not texts); it is significant that the advent of democracy reversed the watchword: the (secondary) school prides itself on teaching reading and no longer writing

The Text (if only by its frequent “unreadability”) decants the work

the I that writes the text is never anything but a paper I.

Hence, confronting the work, the Text might indeed take for its motto the words of the man possessed by devils: “My name is legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9). The plural or demonic texture which sets the Text in opposition to the work may involve profound modifications of reading, precisely where monologism seems to be the law: certain “texts” of Scripture, traditionally adopted by theological (historical or anagogical) monism, may lend themselves to a diffraction of meanings (i.e., finally, to a materialist reading), while the Marxist interpretation of the work, hitherto resolutely monistic, may become more materialist by pluralizing itself (if, of course, Marxist “institutions” permit this).

wadi

the stereographic plurality of the signifiers

The text is approached and experienced in relation to the sign.

paradoxical

Or again: the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example, at a library shelf); its constitutive moment is traversal (notably, it can traverse the work, several works).

understood as a computable object

method, genres, the sign, the plural, filiation, reading, pleasure

Confronting the work–a traditional notion, long since, and still today, conceived in what we might call a Newtonian fashion–there now occurs the demand for a new object, obtained by a shift or a reversal of previous categories.

It ends with love, exchange, fellowship

it begins effectively (and not by the simple utterance of a pious hope) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down-perhaps even violently, through the shocks of fashion-to the advantage of a new object, a new language, neither of which is precisely this discomfort of classification which permits diagnosing a certain mutation

I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

You filled me with hope

my time here has now come to an end,

NOTES

If the tragicomic blues spirit of collective affirmation he identified with a music born in his youth was less frequently heard with the passing of time, Ellison worked all the more to commemorate the “romantic lyricism” of a receding world. Thus he offered the following dedication to his never-published second novel: “To That Vanished Tribe Into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes.”

Putting his blues modernism to work on a nationalist project, Ellison transforms the embrace of the remainder into a new dialectic and an American jeremiad in an African-American idiom. Here he sides with the ideal of an unbuilt and prospective America. Rejecting one dialectical model of history but identifying with all that is left out of that model, the narrator brilliantly uses these very residues to fuel another dialectic of history.

In order to move with fidelity toward the distant new world of an idealized pluralistic and post-racist America, an older segregated African-American world, with its joys and its restrictions, had to give way. Ellison could at least maintain fidelity to that past world through his home-made stereo and private archive that sonically reproduced the beautiful world of his youth as he imagined it.

Moreover, the lurid tableau of Parker’s plunge into self-degrading performance before a “ravenous, sensation-starved” white audience closely follows a fictional precedent from Invisible Man: Tod Clifton’s final appearance as a vacant-eyed street performer indistinguishable from the paper Sambo doll he manipulates for small change. “Who wants Sambo, the dancing, prancing? . . . There’s no license for little Sambo, the joy spreader. You can’t tax joy, so speak up, ladies and gentlemen” (433). Here was the full price of vertiginous plunging.

Ellison’s preferred mode of lyricism in African-American music belonged to what struck him as a comparatively optimistic pre-bebop music of social romance.

Only in holding themselves close to their native community and its rituals of socialization were these men able to cultivate the deepest level of individuality and artistry. Mastering musical form in the swinging guises of jazz and the blues committed these musicians to what we might call a centripetal ethos of lyrical transition even as they enacted “from performance to performance” a more centrifugal and decentering process of what Kimberley Benston calls “multiplication and substitution.”(16)

anomic

vertiginous

While “the Negro” functioned as a guilt-inducing and thus repressed or demonized presence within white American culture, a psychoanalytically informed post-war modernism might point to more sober possibilities for working through the nation’s racial pathologies. Here was another reason for Ellison’s blues aesthetic to eschew the romanticization of unmediated expression or naturalness in favor of a nearly classicist stress on restraint and self-control. The latter provided the firmest stabilizing equipment for the existential plunge into the “seething vortex” of modernity.

frisson

jouissance

Such limit-case experiences of racial identification cause a kind of psychological and epistemological vertigo.

He once noted that as an eleven-year-old he had dipped into Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1905).

In such a case Ellison redescribed the African-American blues as a raft, if not a generating motor, for moving closer to the “democratic ideal.” At least on some occasions the blues came to the aid of his anti-racist dialectic of democratic national becoming.

Ultimately, the narrator will summon Armstrong’s “beam of lyrical sound” as a heroic model for transforming slips, breaks, and plunges into opportunities to master “the swift and imperceptible flowing of time.” A dawning transvaluation of slips and plunges derived from the African-American blues, one of Armstrong’s chief idiomatic sources, will also enrich the narrator.

Armstrong may have been a representative of an African-American “underworld of sound” but his musical revolution was on intimate terms with the white mainstream of American popular music. The critic Nathaniel Mackey has recently elaborated a theoretical understanding of intimacy and discrepancy through a distinction between “musical othering” and “social othering” that is relevant to this discussion of invisibility’s ironic benefits.

On the level of vernacular culture (if not elsewhere), an invisible but irrepressible “underworld of sound” had already quietly taken over the mainstream. This, too, Ellison heard in Armstrong’s popular music. But how was the United States to pass from the sonic and cultural pluralism Ellison discovered to the post-racist social and political revolution of which it offered some kind of foretaste?

especially the chapter on the “sorrow songs” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Thus, musical othering can submit dominant “fixed equations” and aesthetic norms to what Mackey dubs a “dislocating tilt.”(10)

An extraordinary philosophical faith in the translatability, if not transparency, of meaning across artistic media shone through Ellison’s joint account of racial invisibility and musical technique.

doxa

Musical occasions, that is, play no role in Ellison’s writing by figuring as sites of untranslatable otherness or estrangement. He regularly displayed a Malrauxian fervor for ritual interpretation in his explorations of southern and southwestern African-American music and folkways. Especially in Ellison’s early postwar work, a sense of modernization as an abrupt and volcanic process of cultural upheaval hovered over these explorations. What was happening to African-Americans’ “traditional” cultural tools – what Ellison’s friend Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living” – in the seemingly chaotic context of northern migration and urban proletarianization?(6) Ellison adapted the work of Malraux and other theorists to style his own response to the processes of disruption, survival, and transformation in African-American modernity.

metonym

A closer look at his skeptical commentaries on Parker’s prominent role in the stylistic innovations of the 1940s jazz modernists reveals Ellison’s fascinating and rarely discussed inhabitation of the posture of a musical revanchist committed to the musical superiority of certain pre-World War II idioms.

revanchist

the scene operated as a regulative norm for the mature Ellison.

Fig. 2 Lisette Model, Reflection, New York, c. 1939-45

“Reflections, New York,”

Fig. 1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Untitled (Rouen, 1929)

(“Budapest,” 1931).

hortatory

auratic

In this episode, documentary is transformed from a method of exposure – a technique applied to the hapless, the forgotten, the marginal and unself-conscious – into a powerful exercise, at once aesthetic and political, of self-knowledge.

sui generis

Photographs Miscellaneous Invisible Men.”(24) At one point, the binder appears to have included a stack of images;

the tenements and alleys and basements; “the gin mills and the barber shops and the juke joints and the churches” where, as Ellison’s narrator argues, a “whole unrecorded history is spoken” (471).

Yet if this desire impelled any number of writers and intellectuals of Ellison’s generation, it had a particular power, and particular novelistic uses, for him.

Putting the camera back in his hand,

Ahead of me the body hung, white, naked, and horribly feminine from a lamppost.

No wonder, then, that black writers and intellectuals were so fascinated by the evolving history and artifacts of documentary photography.

Even the somewhat random, as-yet uncatalogued, photographs housed with Ellison’s archived papers suggest a certain rehearsal on his part of the menu of representational possibilities: formalist, socially conscious, reportial, intimate.

he habitually posed for photographs and self-portraits with camera in hand

the materials preserved in his archive

the young Ellison serendipitously finds “a large photographic lens”

reified

apercu

Ellison was to some extent merely one of his generation

But Ellison’s negotiations of racial history and experience in Invisible Man owe an as-yet unacknowledged debt to another cultural form with which he purposively experimented: photography.

“Ralph Ellison, Photographer.”

Among readers of Ellison, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the benchmark for his aesthetics and novelistic style is jazz.

Tuckahoe

The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

Slavery is sixty years in the past.

I do not be long to the sobbing school of Negrohood

I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown–warranted not to rub nor run.

I remember the very day that I became colored.

got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

merge his double self into a better and truer self.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others

the revelation first bursts upon one

How does it feel to be a problem?

Between

need I add that I who speak

Gentle Reader

Standing on the bare ground

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design.

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

In summary then, IVANHOE can be used in a variety of ways as a competitive, game-like environment, as a collaborative study and research situation, or as a context in which players strive to achieve their own individual goals. In a classroom setting, IVANHOE could encourage students to improve bibliographical and research skills in one round and critical-reading skills in the next. Individual students could decide which of several interpretive skills they wish to improve in a round of play, or they could consult with a teacher to set these goals. For more mature players, various competitive or collaborative situations might be imagined to promote specific types of critical reflection and scholarly research. IVANHOE can be played in a game mode with points, scoring, and competitive interactions. It can also be used for non-competitive collaborative work within a community of scholars or in classroom activities.

The test runs also suggested two other useful ways in which to explore the tool's design possibilities: first, to deploy IVANHOE as both a pedagogical and a scholarly research tool; second, to launch its functions in a born-digital database of materials. IVANHOE's interpretational capacities were conceived to have wide range and flexibility across every sort of informational material in the humanities and the social sciences

One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk.

critic executes the work

the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than giving it 'expression'. The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration.

to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading

It is not that the Author may not 'come back' in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a 'guest'. If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic.

the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric).

the sign. The work closes on a signified

its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).  

it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text

what preconceptions students have about your course material

If students’ prior knowledge is faulty

That way, every student has the opportunity to answer the question, practice memory retrieval from the previous session, or surface their prior knowledge — and not just the students most likely to raise their hands in class.

But instead of offering a capsule review to students, why not ask them to offer one back to you?

At the end, he returns to the questions so that students can both see some potential answers and understand that they have learned something that day.

the first five minutes of a college class often get frittered away with logistical tasks

Teenagers

It will be just the sort of seamless decision we make every day when we decide whether we will place a phone call, send an e-mail message or text message or photo or video, handwrite a note, or make a personal visit.

Audiobooks also impose a certain discipline. I think of this as real-time reading: The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section.

Impossible to imagine that any of these newfangled devices could last nearly 40 years.

it taught me a great deal about my reading habits

I decided to read Little Dorrit four ways: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.

I am a rather elderly man

The use of images in Citizen is meant in part to destabilize the text so both image and text would always have possibilities, both realized and unimagined by me, beyond my curating powers. Consequently, I wanted to create an aesthetic form for myself, where the text was trembling and doubling and wandering in its negotiation and renegotiation of the image, a form where the text’s stated claims and interests would reverberate off the included visuals.

Plus, it takes forever to get to know someone and, even then, we are often surprised—by ourselves, by each other. Claudia and I have built a friendship through consultation about whether our tones are crazy, wrong, off, or right; about whether or not our observations show something, and what.

Keep moving even when we’re still. Find stillness when we’re jolted.

The photographer Jeff Wall writes about moving into moments of eroding freedoms. He describes racism as “determined by social totality” that “has to come out of an individual body.”

There’s not a lot of laughter in Citizen. No doubt, that sense motivates your use of the word maneuver—it means, etymologically, “to work with one’s hands,” but it’s usually a way of talking about unsticking something, getting around an impasse or an obstacle course, or dealing with touchy subjects.