in a prequel to a book
Yes: and its a prequel that was written last, so it is a "restarting" of the book from its end in a certain way. The temporality of the composition of the book, and the temporality of how "we" readers find ourselves in the book, is super interesting.
Hegel constantly brings up science throughout the text, and the limit of science is something to note when it comes to philosophy,
Crucial issue. Two quick things:
Second, I think his critique of the "natural science" of his day is that it fails to reckon with the problem of using "cognition as an instrument," and seeing that the gathering of "data" (which means the "given" in Latin) is not innocent and is already structured by our biases of selection, our desire to "discover" X or Y in that data even before we gather it, our very presence within the "field" we're studying. It's an interesting question, what Hegelian natural science would even look like, though some modes of ecological science and, along another axis, quantum physics, might give some clues.
bird caught on the twig
I don't think this example is Hegel's best. The big points seem to be: * we might be tempted to think of cognition as an "instrument" or "tool" to grasp a reality that's outside of itself. This is, more or less, Locke's position, whereby sensory data (including that improved upon by yardsticks and thermometers and lenses) yields "data" about the world that has great fidelity to that world * we might also think (and this is Kant's position, more or less) that cognition is a "medium" through which reality passes, distorting it but in a way that allows us to "correct" for bias to some extent. So, we don't know whether space/time/extension/hardness/etc. are "real" in a final sense, but they are how our brains can process or filter a reality whose final "an sich" reality eludes us.
H dismisses both of these approaches: if we examine a bird perched on a twig, we're seeing a partial/imperfect representation of the bird. If we remove the twig, the bird flies away, and we're right where we started.
H will pursue neither the "tool" nor the "medium" argument, instead building up a mode of consciousness in which consciousness is not "apart" form anything but is "a part of" everything, including the inanimate material world and the collective Geist of what he calls the "Absolute." But sweet Jesus: he can't tell us yet how that works or what that looks like, so we MUST KEEP READING!!
use of evil in paragraph 73
I don't have the Oxford translation here but don't see "evil" in the German. I'm curious to look back this afternoon!
where cognition, the absolute and science intersect, and this is where I need more elaboration from Hegel.
At this point in the Introduction, Hegel is trying to kind of "skip ahead" and point out how his method will end up differing from that of empiricists like Locke and especially from Kantian proto-cognitive psychology. So the "more elaboration" is coming, but only as we work through the entire text! And it's implicit in his method that it's impossible to summarize what he's going to do, which can only be "performed," so to speak, in the text. So you're registering EXACTLY what a canny reader should feel/notice here!
is the universal act of pointing out
Yes, and I keep thinking of the moment when my son, as a toddler, started pointing, shakily, at things and saying, "DAT" all day long. The minimal word, the minimal gesture, that minimally says "there is a thing" without real awareness of the subject seeing that thing, the inner reality of the thing, or the contingencies of the processing/signal loss of the encounter.
things that go on all at once rather than of stages of experience
Interesting point. There is some sense of ontological/phylogenetical development in both Freud and Lacan (Hamlet and Oedipus couldn't switch places because the Greeks were not repressed enough, and the Elizbethans were too much; the "imaginary" emerges at a particular moment in development for observable neurological/motor cortext reasons), but your "things go on all at once" seems accurate and marks a sharp contrast with the generally orderly "upward" movement of Hegel's subject's development.
we ourselves are what keep the whole in motion.
You draw a tight focus on what is, for me, a great question. Who is the subject of this "simple" mode of knowing the "here/now"? You're right to emphasize that there's no "I" that sits outside of it in a transcendental way, though there is a "we" in the text that does lurk on the outskirts, composed of the phenomenologist and his audience, I think, who help to "tell" the parts that the consciousness itself can't grasp yet, especially at the ends of sections before a major Aufhebung. And the plane flying itself is an arresting metaphor: thanks, Slavoj. I also think of the somewhat cliched bit of corporate-speak: we're gonna have to build the airplane while we fly it.
book as a whole is nothing but a compilation of such layers
I like your attempts to metaphorize the overall shape of the text. The figure of the spiral is an attractive alternative (and Prof. Nico Israel has written a book on spirals in 20thC art and literature): it is a figure of expansion and return, such that (as in the logic of Aufhebung) each revolution expands upon the prior constraints. I find the "book" and "paper" and "writing" metaphors Hegel uses fascinatingly problematic, and I think Derrida's ON GRAMMATOLOGY draws from these problems of presence/absence in the material "trace" of writing in a way that ties back to these moments in the PHENOMENOLOGY.
Donna Masini
A little home cookin': always reppin' Hunter College, folks.
I think you should revise the "welcome" page: call it an ABOUT page, which is more customary. And give a pithier overview of the project as a whole: tell us it was capstone project for the CUNY DH program completed in January 2025; give an overview of the topic in a few sentences. I would leave out the Edison stuff. You're giving the briefest "elevator pitch" on what your project is about. Pull some copy from the white paper?
I love the overall look/palatte/feel of hte site. The text animations are cool! It's a little hard to read the HOME/GALLERY underneath, so might shrink or reword the title to make HOME/GALLERY less occluded.
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.
Pivot from "writerly" reading to "judgement": revision of common sense understanding of reading process.
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.
Sounding a bit like Kazin's "granary of facts" here (or vice versa, really).
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.
Characteristically modernist faith in facts, not as mirrors of the truth, but as stimuli to vivid experience. We read "biographies" (and, presumably, histories and journalism and other forms of nonfiction writing) to achieve this.
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.
Unexpected turn: distracted reading, uneven reading, as a "rejuvenating" force in our reading.
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.
Well said.
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.
Fascinating anticipation of Barthes's famous argument.
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.
Aha: "reading" is too close to us. "What's water?" said the fish.
a room of their own
ha: lil' call-back there. We see what you did.
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.
I think this is a powerful idea. I've been moved to experiment with alternatives to trad essays, if for somewhat different reasons. My 252 final project largely follows the line of thinking TU cites here.
that annoying thesis
TU is being self-deprecating, but I legitimately do find this thesis annoying in important ways. I value innovation in teaching and try to practice it when possible, but what happens when these demands trickle down to the vast majority of faculty (and virtually all Hunter faculty) who, at best, have 3/3 loads with 60-75 students/term or more? And with students who vary widely in their preparation for college and familiarity with disciplinary protocols and so much else? Is it realistic to think that we're going to punt on teaching them close reading and competent essay-writing and set them to work creating corpora and doing ethnographies?
As Marc Watkins has recently noted, patching pedagogy with surveillance is a cure worse than the disease.)
I couldn't agree more.
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.
Crucial concession moment in TUs argument that you could drive a truck through. Ideally we spend most of our time in the ENGL major in the more creative, generative side of learning, but I think it's unavoidable that students need to just plain ol' learn some stuff about literary history, well-trodden warhorses in literary and cultural theory, the kinds of things we all teach in 304, 307, 320, 306, and so on.
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.
This is also Jacques Ranciere's model in the indispensable THE IGNORANT SCHOOLMASTER!
he expected it would be hard for students to answer his assignments using AI
I had a similar experience last term with what I thought was an AI-proof take-home essay exam in "Intro to Theory" (ENGL 306). Uhhh I was very wrong.
In my essay, then,
Grassroots
Huh?
deep time”
What is "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
To get a sense of what Anderson is talking about sonically, check out Louis Armstrong's sublime set of breaks on "Potato Head Blues" (1927) with the Hot Seven. Go listen to like two hours of the classic Hot Fives and Sevens. If you just want to catch the breaks and have other priorities (sigh), here's a link that skips to the breaks.
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.
Skillful exit from the post, summing up the main point but in a way that's lively and engaging rather than merely repetitive.
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)!
Note the direct quotation and analysis of a juicy passage. Your posts should most definitely do this.
is akin to a concept described in “The Fact of Blackness,” the fifth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.
I love the intertextual move: that is, the author ties the "primary text" (Ellison) to a "secondary text" (Fanon's philosophical essay). You don't have to do this routinely, but it's great to connect disparate texts like this.
Comparatively, the men’s smoke fogs the room into a haze so they literally cannot see the boys.
This argument goes beyond casual summary or restatement to show us something that most casual readers will have missed. This is your main job as a critic!
Cigars are an important symbol of light
It may be hard to see if you don't already know the novel, but note that the author picks up on a subtle feature, the presence of cigars, and shows how central it is to the novel.
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.
The author dives straight into an argument--that "color and light symbolism" do a specific job in this passage from Ellison's novel.
No Vision or Visibility for the Invisible Man
Note the intriguing title. Don't use generic titles like "Blog Post #1"!
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.
What would be involved in the act of "merging" that Du Bois fantasizes about?
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
What is "peculiar" about Du Bois's mode of perception? How does his "double consciousness" compare to Emerson's experience of the "bare earth" in "Nature"? Why doesn't Du Bois just head out for the "perfect sweetness of solitude"?
It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one,
What is the "revelation" that bursts up on Du Bois in childhood? What choices does it leave Du Bois as he attempts to work through it?
To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
What does it mean to be a problem? Why is this such a strange-sounding construction and what are some of its implications?
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question
What's the first word of the first chapter? Why is betweenness such a crucial term in Du Bois's discourse? How does this opening compare to Emerson's?
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?
What is the rhetorical effect of this line? What would it mean for him to "add" or not "add" the fact of his blackness? What do you make of his dramatic understatement, his "need I add," that doesn't quite add or subtract his racial identity?
Gentle Reader
Who is this "gentle reader"? How does Du Bois situate reader and writer in this piece from the beginning? What is "hidden," and from whom?
OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism
What is the contrast in generations RWE sets up here? What is the problem with his generation in the middle of the 19th century?
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.
What is implied about how we know what we know here? What might be some problems with this argument?
Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.
How does Emerson define "nature" and how does his definition differ from traditional definitions?
There is a property in the horizon
Who owns the landscape, according to Emerson? How does this ownership work, and how does it differ from traditional ideas of property and ownership?
Standing on the bare ground
What happens to Emerson as he stands on this "bare ground"? What does he gain and what does he lose in this moment? What are some of the anxieties that lurk in this passage beneath the celebratory tone?
buried
interesting word
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.
What's imperfect about this piece? Glad you asked:
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”.
Had the author stopped here, it would still be A work. But she relates Butler's argument to another text IRL as it were, the documentary "Paris is Burning." This move shows why Butler's work matters and how it might be applied to analysis of cultural texts.
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.
Again, note the handholds with others' work (here, Kristeva and Foucault).
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.
Note how she relates Butler's work to a prior work we'd read, that of Michel Foucault. This is always a great move, by way of comparison and contrast and of showing how theorists stand on each others' shoulders.
This is problematic because it enable people to police another person’s gender identity, sexual orientation, gender, and validate/invalidate their own experiences.
She goes beyond the mere summary of Butler's argument (which is complex and requires heavy lifting itself) to tell us why her argument matters.
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.
Clear articulation of the focus from the top, including a pithy statement of the author's main point: here, a gloss of the unfamiliar term "performative."
Nice Girls Don’t Wear Cha Cha Heels
Lively title!
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
Interesting historical relationship with the picture book. The picture book has been such a vibrant area of experimentation with form, text/image interrelations, etc. Might the way forward, especially with the rise of ever-cheaper tablets, be a more robust multimodal storytelling? One can imagine video gaming as a possible pathway here: arguably this is already happening with immersive, visually rich "quest" and "puzzle" games like Zelda.
here is some music and sound effects throughout, but it is mostly the narrator speaking. StoryNory does not offer text for this particular story.
Literary children's podcasts is a very vibrant area right now (as with all manner of podcasting, obviously). To me, interesting to note the revival of traditional storytelling (Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest, with retellings of classics) and of encouraging children as writers (the incomparable Story Pirates, with improv actors soliciting stories from children and working them into full-blown musical theater).
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.
Fascinating history and one of many "dead ends" that media historians are familiar with, one that could easily be reanimated in the future.
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.
Nice close reading. I remember "reading" these myself in the 70s. I like the tie-in to the earlier comments on print literacy and listening.
Orson Welles adapted Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince (Decca, 1946), and narrated it alongside Bing Crosb
Interesting echo with our own moment, with big stars like Kate Winslett and Jeremy Irons as players in the a-book industry.
frist century
first
see how the pages were sleeves to hold the records.
I like the emphasis on the "form factor" and how this medium occasions a rethinking of what "book" means.
Oral tradition is the original storytelling
Yes: given the way audiobooks have grown their market share so quickly, we might ask whether silent solitary reading is the historical aberration rather than the evolutionary culmination of reading.
in the case of Teddy Ruxpin
One wonders about further exploration of this haptic dimension of the children's abook (if we can call it that) as the "internet of things" develops.
but retained several features from previous formats
I dig the dialectical emphasis.
examines the history of children’s audiobooks and considers its previous formats to determine what the future of children’s audiobooks
Reminds me of Rubery's backward-looking, forward-looking approach.
always forces us to imagine analogous genres
How does Berlant attack this problem of genre, of how to compare Rankine's "lyrics" to other literary genres, art forms, experiences?
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.
What are the big questions Anderson asks the text of Invisible Man? What does he want to discover about the text in his reading? What kinds of sources or methods will he need to use to answer his question/s?
A couple of notes for first-time users of hypothes.is:
discourse on the Text should itself be only text, research, textual activity
Here Barthes joins a robust tradition of artist-critics who abolish the distinction between "primary" (imaginative literature) and "secondary" (criticism): Derrida, Brecht, Godard, and so on...
This is a consequence of the fact that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied with a meta- linguistic exposition
Barthes: "in other words, I practice what I preach."
The Text is a little like a score of this new kind: it solicits from the reader a practical collaboration.
I love this idea that readers/writers of the "text" are like friends gathered around the piano in olden times in which to hear music, you had to make it. Reminds me of Matt Rubery's work on oralizations of Victorian literatur.
“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
This is basically the mission statement of this course...
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
Profound point with an extremely compressed history within it: access to reading and writing are always bound up in class distinctions. Indeed, in our own moment it's clear that, the more expensive the education, the more it is oriented towards writing and the production of texts; the cheaper, the more it's oriented towards the inscription, as it were of the student via automated ed-tech interfaces with its XP and badges and Foucaultian surveillance techniques.
The Text (if only by its frequent “unreadability”) decants the work
Another gorgeous metaphor and very French!
the I that writes the text is never anything but a paper I.
Here we see the return of the physics analogy: as in quantum physics, the object has no autonomous existence apart from the process of its creation or recreation via reading/observation/reenactment.
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).
Further elaboration of the "paradoxical" aspect of the text. His critique comes into clearer focus in light of the dominance of "formalist" or "structuralist"modes of criticism that presupposed a unity of the text. Barthes's own famous "mythologies" of pop cultural objects like soap or the Tour de France themselves were relatively "monistic" in this sense.
wadi
(in certain Arabic-speaking countries) a valley, ravine, or channel that is dry except in the rainy season. Thanks, dictionary.com.
the stereographic plurality of the signifiers
Man, I love this dude's metaphorics: explosion, indeed.
The text is approached and experienced in relation to the sign.
For those of you who are not theory nerds, this riff is based on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, which exerted enormous influence on 20thC cultural theory in France and, really, everywhere. "Signifier" means the arbitrary combination of sounds or letters that makes up an "utterance" in language and "signified" means the idea that signifier points to. The letters T-R-E-E is the signifier; the mental image of the thing with leaves in the signified.
paradoxical
Nice turn of phrase that digs into etymology: the text is next to but not connected to (para) the common belief structure or "common sense" (doxa).
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).
I started to lose him above, but this last couple of sentences secures it for me, as the primacy of practice, of process comes into focus. To borrow from the language of the course, one "does things" with texts; one "reads" works.
understood as a computable object
Barthes is speaking metaphorically and at a time when computing is in its adolescence, if not infancy. But it's kind of funny to read this sentence now, when texts are eminently computable in a much more literal sense!
method, genres, the sign, the plural, filiation, reading, pleasure
That's all? Quite a menagerie of terms here, Roland...
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.
This extended metaphor linking theoretical physics and the humanities makes me wonder whether our present-day fascination with text mining, distant reading, and so on represents another turn of the screw that (to extend the analogy) resembles discussions of "quantum gravity" that try to link Einstein and Heisenberg, the macro and the nano scales.
It ends with love, exchange, fellowship
test: where does it begin?
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
Certainly the early years of DH felt like an echo of the late 60s-early 70s moment Barthes is feeling here.
A couple of notes for first-time readers of this text:
I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries
Note how Emerson's "transparent eyeball" slips in through the back door here as Zora becomes "cosmic." Very interesting to think that the ecstatic mode that she enters via jazz opens up the kind of transcendence that Emerson derives from nature, from the "bare common."
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.
What's ZNH getting at here? What claim is she making about whiteness and the problems of "possessing" it, in the words of George Lipsitz
You filled me with hope
indeed
my time here has now come to an end,
too soon.
NOTES
General question: what are some fields of knowledge that Anderson needed to know in order to write this piece? What do his readers need to know in order to read his work? What are some of the different kinds of sources did he marshal to make his argument?
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.”
What is Anderson's evaluation of Ellison's legacy, in the end? What does he affirm about Ellison, and what does he criticize? Do you think Anderson gives a fair assessment?
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.
Unpack this very dense passage. What is "blues modernity"? What does Ellison preserve from the Brotherhood, and what does he revise or add to it?
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.
How does the phonograph--which appears in the novel as well--mediate for Anderson the conflict between Ellison's old-school tastes in music and the newer forms that are arising in the 1950s and 60s? What are some of the implications of this reading, in which the old and new co-exist in the same cultural moment?
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.
How does Anderson link Parker (well, Ellison's depiction of Parker) to Ellison's novel? How does the comparison of Parker to Tod Clifton work? Do you buy this reading?
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.
How do Ellison's tastes in music link up with broader narratives in music history (swing to bebop)? How does Anderson explain Ellison's "lagging" taste, preferring the older swing of Basie and Ellison to the new 'bop of Parker and Miles Davis? Why does this issue of what kind of music Ellison prefers matter so much?
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)
Two questions: a) is Rinehart the hero of Ellison's novel? Why or why not? and b) how does the long discussion of Rinehart relate to the encompassing discussion of Ellison and music? Playing music is about the only thing that Rinehart doesn't do!
anomic
Definition?
vertiginous
definition?
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.
What's the problem with the "primitive" for African American artists, according to Anderson? What other examples from IM can you think of that carry out this implicit critique of celebrating black "primitivity"?
frisson
Definition?
jouissance
definition?
Such limit-case experiences of racial identification cause a kind of psychological and epistemological vertigo.
We saw something like this in Hurston's essay, when she hears the jazz band in a Harlem cabaret.
He once noted that as an eleven-year-old he had dipped into Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1905).
Didn't we all go through a phase of reading Freud's unabridged work in 5th grade?
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.
Unpack Ellison's figure linking the blues and the novel as a "raft" of sorts. How does this figure help us to see a kinship between the blues and the novel as cultural forms? What are the implications of seeing both as "rafts" rather than the kind of structures that grow out of "blueprints"?
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.
How is musical form an analogue or aspirational model for writing fiction for Ellison? What's the logic of this connection? What can listening to Armstrong teach the novelist?
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.
Anderson's argument gets a bit hard to follow here, for me at least. Is that a mistake on his part? Why might that be? What does this opacity tell us about his style and, perhaps, his method in this piece?
Is it clear by the end of this section why Anderson took us on this seeming detour through his theoretical analysis of "invisibility"? What is the connection?
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?
What is the relationship between Ellison's writing and the pre-existing tradition of African American vernacular music in this passage? Also, note how Anderson uses a rhetorical question here: why? What's the benefit of pulling out this question at this point in the argument?
especially the chapter on the “sorrow songs” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
I TOLD y'all that book was important!
Thus, musical othering can submit dominant “fixed equations” and aesthetic norms to what Mackey dubs a “dislocating tilt.”(10)
What is the relationship between "musical othering" and "social othering"? How might this relationship reflect back on Ellison's novel?
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.
What is Ellison's implied disagreement with his mentors at Tuskeegee (remember: the model for the campus life depicted in IM)? What counter-model does he offer for thinking about "folk" materials?
doxa
definition?
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.
We get into the deep water here in Anderson's argument. How, according to Anderson, does Ellison think about music? How does his approach differ from other music critics? What were some of his models in developing this perspective, and how do they help him link African American music to other cultural objects? Also, note how Anderson starts with a pretty simple, clear intro and starts to tamp down on it here into something denser.
metonym
definition?
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.
What's the "intervention" Anderson wants to make with this piece? What does he have to say that hasn't been said, especially in a critical conversation that (as Blair points out) is already very crowded? More broadly, what can we learn here about how to create some "elbow room" for our own arguments in oft-discussed texts?
revanchist
definition?
the scene operated as a regulative norm for the mature Ellison.
What does Anderson mean by a "regulative norm"? What is the "delicate balance" Ellison describes here? Why does jazz matter so much to Ellison, becoming more that mere entertainment?
Fig. 2 Lisette Model, Reflection, New York, c. 1939-45
“Reflections, New York,”
Fig. 1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Untitled (Rouen, 1929)
(“Budapest,” 1931).
hortatory
Definition?
auratic
Definition?
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.
How does Blair's argument respond to the idea that documentary work reduces its subjects, exploits its subjects, sticks them to a board on a pin and scrawls labels under them?
sui generis
definition?
Photographs Miscellaneous Invisible Men.”(24) At one point, the binder appears to have included a stack of images;
What are some implications of Ellison's having a folder with images of "invisible men"? How does this archival discovery link to her broader argument?
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).
Unpack this moment in Blair's argument: how does this passage, which is not about photography at all, nevertheless link up with Blair's argument about documentary modes of representation and the camera?
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.
What are some of the pitfalls and potentialities of engaging photography for Ellison, as a writer of color in the 1930s and 40s? What have prior critics said about this relation, and what does Blair want to add that's new?
Putting the camera back in his hand,
Blair ends the article with a riff on what happens when we "put the camera back in Ellison's hand." What does happen? Is looking at Ellison's relationship to photography something she's added to an evaluation of his novel, or does it force us to think about the novel in new ways?
Ahead of me the body hung, white, naked, and horribly feminine from a lamppost.
How does Blair read this surreal image on p. 556 of the hanged mannequins? What does it add to our reading of Ellison's novel to read this image alongside other depictions of mannequins from contemporary photographers like Cartier-Bresson? What does this interpretive move tell us about Blair's methodology?
No wonder, then, that black writers and intellectuals were so fascinated by the evolving history and artifacts of documentary photography.
How does Blair link Ellison to the broader context of "documentary" work in the 1930s and beyond? What does it mean for an African American artist to do "documentary" work? How does Blair link Ellison to broader themes in African American and American culture through this exploration of documentary?
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.
Blair takes rather seriously the idea that Ellison is a photographer, not just a writer who snaps photos. As such, how does his work fit into the landscape of postwar art photography? How does she massage him into the broader story of the history of photography? How does Ellison's place in this history relate to his examination of "invisibility" in the novel?
he habitually posed for photographs and self-portraits with camera in hand
What happens when Blair shifts from Ellison as photography to Ellison as subject of photography? How does she read his performances, so to speak, in front of the camera?
the materials preserved in his archive
What does Blair find in Ellison's archive and how does she put it to use? What strikes you about her methodology here? What significance does she find in materials that one might ordinarily find, well, insignificant?
the young Ellison serendipitously finds “a large photographic lens”
What does Blair do with this seemingly minor anecdote in one of Ellison's memoirish essays, about finding a camera lens? Why is this such a big deal? What can we learn from Blair about writing criticism from this move, digging up this anecdote and applying it in this way?
reified
definition?
apercu
definition?
Ellison was to some extent merely one of his generation
How does Blair "historicize" Ellison's work? To the implied question, "how did Ellison's work, including his fascination with photography, link up with broader cultural historical currents?," what kinds of answers does she give? How does Ellison's race fit into this broader narrative?
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.
Okay, bold claim, but how does Blair set out to convince us of this argument? What will be her "methodology"? What have prior critics missed in their readings of Ellison's novel?
“Ralph Ellison, Photographer.”
What are the implications of this object Blair has pulled from the archives? Why does it matter what's written on Ellison's old memoranda sheets? What's a memoranda sheet, anyway? Why was photography so important to Ellison, and how do we know?
General note: this is the first piece of criticism we're reading for the course (I'm leaving out the theoretical pieces by Emerson, Du Bois, etc., which did not analyze a particular literary text). Here, I want to pose some questions in the margins that call attention to the craft of criticism: what moves critics make, what methodologies they employ, what assumptions they make about what their readers know and don't know, what questions they ask of the text, implicitly or explicitly. We'll keep developing these skills throughout the term, and you'll develop more independence as you go. For now, you'll be sort of reading over my shoulder. For those who have read Dante, I'll be the Virgil to your Dante!
Among readers of Ellison, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the benchmark for his aesthetics and novelistic style is jazz.
Note the "here's how everyone else reads this text" opening move. What are the advantages of starting this way? How does Blair develop this theme of a critical consensus, and how does she wedge herself in the discussion?
Tuckahoe
Funny name.
The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
Surprising echo of Emerson's "Nature" here, no?
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.
Pathological whiteness. There's a hilarious moment in Kiese Laymon's recent Heavy, in which Laymon's college friend, noticing his being depressed, counsels him not to take antidepressants. He tells Laymon that he took them and "felt like a white dude" until he quit.
I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
Spoiler alert, but we'll see Claudia Rankine chew on this line later in the term.
Slavery is sixty years in the past.
Now that chattel slavery is about 150 years in the past, how does this passage read? Where does this idea place Hurston in political terms?
I do not be long to the sobbing school of Negrohood
How is Hurston positioning herself in cultural terms here? What does she mean by the "sobbing school"? Can you think of an example?
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.
What does she mean that she "was not Zora" in Jacksonville? How does this relate to her claims of being "owned" by Eatonville in the prior paragraph?
I remember the very day that I became colored.
Compare to Du Bois's parallel but very different account.
got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
Very different perspective on the gaze v look problem Du Bois wrestles with.
merge his double self into a better and truer self.
What would be involved in the act of "merging" that Du Bois fantasizes about?
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others
What is "peculiar" about Du Bois's mode of perception? How does his "double consciousness" compare to Emerson's experience of the "bare earth" in "Nature"? Why doesn't Du Bois just head out for the "perfect sweetness of solitude"?
the revelation first bursts upon one
What is the "revelation" that bursts up on Du Bois in childhood? What choices does it leave Du Bois as he attempts to work through it?
How does it feel to be a problem?
What does it mean to be a problem? Why is this such a strange-sounding construction and what are some of its implications?
Between
What's the first word of the first chapter? Why is betweenness such a crucial term in Du Bois's discourse? How does this opening compare to Emerson's?
need I add that I who speak
What is the rhetorical effect of this line? What would it mean for him to "add" or not "add" the fact of his blackness? What do you make of his dramatic understatement, his "need I add," that doesn't quite add or subtract his racial identity?
Gentle Reader
Who is this "gentle reader"? How does Du Bois situate reader and writer in this piece from the beginning? What is "hidden," and from whom?
Standing on the bare ground
What happens to Emerson as he stands on this "bare ground"? What does he gain and what does he lose in this moment? What are some of the anxieties that lurk in this passage beneath the celebratory tone?
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.
Who owns the landscape, according to Emerson? How does this ownership work, and how does it differ from traditional ideas of property and ownership?
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.
How does Emerson define "nature" and how does his definition differ from traditional definitions?
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.
What is implied about how we know what we know here? What might be some problems with this argument?
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?
What is the contrast in generations RWE sets up here? What is the problem with his generation in the middle of the 19th century?
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.
Like the focus on the flexibility of the instrument. But how would you keep score?
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
Note emphasis on empirical language: they ran "tests" or "experiments" based on hunches and the desire to test out the technology's limits and blind spots. Emphasis on collective investigation, iterative exploration.
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.
The note of technocratic celebration is so striking here in the age of Alexa and Siri. Now that we're all thinking about "weapons of math destruction" and the asymmetries that characterize the relationship between ordinary citizens and Big Data in so many contexts, it's strange to hear this sunny celebration of frictionless data in the hands of, well, everyone.
critic executes the work
Barthes is not thinking about this valence, but the phrase makes me think of the three permissions levels that structure access to texts in UNIX: read/write/execute. Readers of the "work" have read-only access: they consume it without inscribing it. Execute permission allows changes to the operating system itself: the energy of the passage points us towards hacking texts at this root level...
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.
This could be the slogan for our course! Doing things with novels means engaging them in a "practical collaboration," not only with the text but with other writer/readers.
to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading
I hope y'all can feel the force of using hypothes.is on this text in particular: we are engaging in precisely the kind of work/play that RB assigns to the world of the "text."
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.
I love this passage. Once you publish something, it ceases to be yours, or at least exclusively yours. If you return to it, you are just another reader or critic. Think of all the readings you've been to when someone from the peanut gallery disagrees with the author's take on the motives of a character or the after-life of the plot! In a few weeks, we will literalize this idea via the Ivanhoe concept, having Melville visit Billy Budd as a "guest" among its characters, narrator, critics, editors, etc.
the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric).
Man, the metaphors are thick on the ground here! The stereograph
is a 19thC cultural technology that shows the viewer two images in an apparatus they look through to create the illusion of depth. RBs point here is that the coherence of the "text," such as it is, is constantly drawn back into the "plurality" of the "weave" that creates it.
the sign. The work closes on a signified
Note that this section is really obscure if you haven't read the work of Ferdinand de Sassure, a Swiss linguist who basically created "semiotics," the systematic study of sign-systems, and whose influence on Barthes is enormous. RBs basic point is that, following Saussure, the "sign" in a symbolic system (say, language) is composed of two components: a "signifier," which is the material inscribed word or aural sound, and a "siginified," which is the meaning conventionally associated with that sound or combination of letters. The "work," for RB, gives up its "signified," its meaning or interpretation, after the critical labor of exegesis (THE ODYSSEY shows the emergence of "civilization," in all its discontents, from the spontaneity of kinship-based cultures), whereas the "text" remains in the field of the signifier in a field of "play" that resists reduction to a meaning (Gertrude Stein, "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose...").
its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).
Reminiscent of the roughly contemporary statement by Derrida that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte: really "there is no outside-text"). In other words, textuality is a web that can't be contained within the hermetic walls of a book's covers; all textuality bleeds over into other texts. RBs reading does not go quite so far, in that he emphasizes the position of texts that pretend, as it were, to be "works" that are hermetic and separable.
it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text
That is a super cute metaphor and encapsulates the entire set of oppositions RB develops here: a) the priority of text over work; b) text as living process v. work as epiphenomenal thing.
what preconceptions students have about your course material
Not a "first five minutes" thing necessarily, but polling is a good way of activating prior knowledge. Prior to the first meeting, I often poll students (using Google Forms or PollEv) on what they've read.
If students’ prior knowledge is faulty
Could get sticky with colleagues. "Foucault WHAT?! Who told you THAT?!..."
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.
I've seen folks do this with index cards: I think the small form factor and disposability emphasizes the spontaneity and makes students more likely to overcome anxiety. I would also add that this exercise is particularly good for introverted and/or insecure students: I think it feels easier to read something than to speak it, for many students.
But instead of offering a capsule review to students, why not ask them to offer one back to you?
Twofer, I like it: a) cognitive psyche-based emphasis on repetition after an interval to cement the memory and b) emphasis on student-centered ethos, on the student becoming the master of what goes down in class.
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.
I like that, especially since the students will have forgotten about the questions by the end in many cases. But will I remember to bring them back?!
the first five minutes of a college class often get frittered away with logistical tasks
I think my teaching notes template actually says "fritter away five minutes" on the first bullet point under the heading.