EC: Vocab/Postcard - Historical Connection.
READ: Excerpts from: Ernest Kaiser, “A Critical Look at Ellison’s Fiction & at Social & Literary Criticism by and about the Author.” Black World. December 1970 [a special Ralph Ellison issue]). 31 May 2007. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/kaiser-on-ellison.html
Socratic Seminar: April 1, 2008 (G) Mar 31, 2008 (W)-Monday
Question: What is the Writer’s Project? - Be Prepared To Discuss - SS Day. - Research and write a paragraph about the scope, purpose, and outcome of this project.
TYPE: AP Style Question:April 1, 2008 (G) Mar 31, 2008 (W)-Wednesday
MC Test/TW: April 3, 2008 (G) - MC Test Only April 2, 2008 - (W)-Friday
TW for White Day Students - April 4, 2008-
Note: White Day Dates were changed (moved forward) due to a Field Trip and a student’s pre-arranged trip. - Make up for the TW for White Day is Tuesday, April 15, 2008 - after school. Please sign up in the Black Book.
Good Luck to All - Have a Safe Break!
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
Paul Laurence Dunbar [1896]
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)
With things going so well I distributed my letters in the mornings, and saw the city during the afternoons. Walking about the streets, sitting on subways beside whites, eating with them in the same cafeterias (although I avoided their tables) gave me the eerie, out-of-focus sensation of a dream. My clothes felt ill-fitting; and for all my letters to men of power, I was unsure of how I should act. For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn’t worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable… —from Invisible Man
TASK: What is The Writer’s Project?: Tell me. Research and write a paragraph about the scope, purpose, and outcome of this project. (BE PREPARED TO DISCUSS WITH YOUR SOCRATIC SEMINAR).
The Writer’s Project: In his Writers’ Project interviews, Ralph Ellison began to experiment with ways of capturing the sound of black speech that he refined in his novel Invisible Man. “I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded. I developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect through misspellings.” A Pullman porter Ellison interviewed in a Harlem bar told him, “I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me,” a refrain he later borrowed for Invisible Man.
The Writers’ Project provided jobs for a diverse assortment of unemployed white-collar workers including beginning and experienced writers—those who had always been poor and the newly down and out. Among those Federal Writers who went on to gain national literary reputations were novelists Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, and poet May Swenson. Distinguished African-American writers served literary apprenticeships on the Federal Writers’ Project, including Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.
BIOGRAPHY: The American writer Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-,1994) - b. Oklahoma City, Okla., Mar. 1, 1914, achieved international fame with his first novel, Invisible Man (1952). He was influenced early by the myth of the frontier, viewing the United States as a land of “infinite possibilities.” The close-knit black community in which he grew up supplied him with images of courage and endurance and an interest in music.
From 1933 to 1936, Ellison attended Tuskegee Institute, intent upon pursuing a career in music; his readings in modern literature, however, interested him in writing. In 1936 he moved to New York City, met the novelist Richard Wright, and became associated with the Federal Writers’ Project, publishing short stories and articles in such magazines as New Challenge and New Masses. These early details of his life, set down in Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, enhance an understanding of Invisible Man. The influences of the frontier tradition, the black community, and Ellison’s interest in music combined to create the richly symbolic, metaphorical language of the novel, as displayed in the Rhinehart and Mary Rambo episodes. Its theme, the human search for identity, also reflects Ellison’s early interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau and his later debt to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Andre Malraux, and Wright. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953. Since 1970, Ellison has been Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University and has lectured extensively on black folk culture….
Gayle, Addison. “Ralph Ellison.” The Writer’s Project. 2003. March 2, 2008. http://www.levity.com/corduroy/ellison.htm
CRITIQUE: In writing INVISIBLE MAN in the late 1940s, Ralph Ellison brought onto the scene a new kind of black protagonist, one at odds with the characters of the leading black novelist at the time, Richard Wright. If Wright’s characters were angry, uneducated, and inarticulate — the consequences of a society that oppressed them — Ellison’s Invisible Man was educated, articulate, and self-aware. Ellison’s view was that the African-American culture and sensibility was far from the downtrodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He posited instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity. When the protagonist in INVISIBLE MAN comes upon a yam seller (named Petie Wheatstraw, after the black folklore figure) on the streets of Harlem and remembers his childhood in a flood of emotion, his proclamation “I yam what I yam!” is Ellison’s expression of embracing one’s culture as the way to freedom.
If Wright’s protest literature was a natural outcome of a brutal childhood spent in the deep South, Ellison’s more affirming approach came out of a very different background in Oklahoma. A “frontier” state with no legacy of slavery, Oklahoma in the 1910s created the possibility of exploring a fluidity between the races not possible even in the North. Although a contemporary recalled that the Ellisons were “among the poorest” in Oklahoma City, Ralph still had the mobility to go to a good school, and the motivation to find mentors, both black and white, from among the most accomplished people in the city. Ellison would later say that as a child he observed that there were two kinds of people, those “who wore their everyday clothes on Sunday, and those who wore their Sunday clothes every day. I wanted to wear Sunday clothes every day.”
Ellison’s life-long receptivity to the variegated culture that surrounded him, beginning in Oklahoma City, served him well in creating a new take on literary modernism in INVISIBLE MAN. The novel references African-American folktales, songs, the blues, jazz, and black traditions like playing the dozens — much as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce had referenced classical Western and Eastern civilization in THE WASTELAND and ULYSSES. An added difference for Ellison was that his modernist narrative was also a vehicle for inscribing his own and the black identity — as well as a roadmap for anyone experiencing themselves as “invisible,” unseen. “Time” magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt would say: “Ralph Ellison taught me what it is to be an American.”
For Ellison, unlike the protest writers and later black separatists, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity; it also created a space for African-Americans to invent their own culture. And in Ellison’s view, black and white culture were inextricably linked, with almost every facet of American life influenced and impacted by the African-American presence — including music, language, folk mythology, clothing styles and sports. Moreover, he felt that the task of the writer is to “tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.” In this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary and political climates of both black and white America; his views would not gain full currency until the 1980s.
In his own life, Ellison’s interests were as far ranging as his “integrative” imagination. He was expert at fishing, hunting, repairing car engines, and assembling radios and stereo systems. His haberdasher in New York said that he “knew more about textiles than anyone I’ve ever met,” and his friend Saul Bellow called him a “thoroughgoing expert on the raising of African violets.” He was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, and photographer. The scope of Ellison’s mind and vision may have contributed to the growing unwieldiness of his much-awaited second novel, which he toiled over for forty years. He planned it as three books, a saga that would encompass the entire American experience. Thus, the book was still unfinished when Ellison died in New York in 1994 at the age of eighty.
INVISIBLE MAN and the essays in SHADOW AND ACT and GOING TO THE TERRITORY were transformative in our thinking about race, identity, and what it means to be American. On the power of three books, Ellison both accelerated America’s literary project and helped define and clarify arguments about race in this country. Ellison’s outlook was universal: he saw the predicament of blacks in America as a metaphor for the universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. The universality and accomplishment of Ellison’s writing can be seen in the breadth of his continuing influence on other writers, from Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson to Kurt Vonnegut and the late Joseph Heller. Fifty years after the publishing of INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison’s voice continues to speak to all.
Seialitz, Anne. “Ralph Ellison. American Masters. PBS. 2003. 2 March 2008.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters /database/ellison_r.html
CRITIQUE: A few years ago, in an otherwise dreary and better forgotten number of Horizon devoted to a louse-up of life in the United States, I read with great excitement an episode from Invisible Man. It described a free-for-all of blindfolded Negro boys at a stag party of the leading citizens of a small Southern town. Before being blindfolded the boys are made to stare at a naked white woman; then they are herded into the ring, and, after the battle royal, one of the fighters, his mouth full of blood, is called upon to give his high school valedictorian’s address. As he stands under the lights of the noisy room, the citizens rib him and make him repeat himself; an accidental reference to equality nearly ruins him, but everything ends well and he receives a handsome briefcase containing a scholarship to a Negro college.
This episode, I thought, might well be the high point of an excellent novel. It has turned out to be not the high point but rather one of the many peaks of a book of the very first order, a superb book. The valedictorian is himself an Invisible Man. He adores the college but is thrown out before long by its president, Dr. Bledsoe, a great educator and leader of his race, for permitting a white visitor to visit the wrong places in the vicinity. Bearing what he believes to be a letter of recommendation from Dr. Bledsoe he comes to New York. The letter actually warns prospective employers against him. He is recruited by white radicals and becomes a Negro leader, and in the radical movement he learns eventually that throughout his entire life his relations with other men have been schematic; neither with Negroes nor with whites has he ever been visible, real. I think that in reading the Horizon excerpt I may have underestimated Mr. Ellison’s ambition and power for the following very good reason, that one is accustomed to expect excellent novels about boys, but a modern novel about men is exceedingly rare. For this enormously complex and difficult American experience of ours very few people are willing to make themselves morally and intellectually responsible. Consequently, maturity is hard to find.
It is commonly felt that there is no strength to match the strength of those powers which attack and cripple modern mankind. And this feeling is, for the reader of modern fiction, all too often confirmed when he approaches a new book. He is prepared, skeptically, to find what he has found before, namely, that family and class, university, fashion, the giants of publicity and manufacture, have had a larger share in the creation of someone called a writer than truth or imagination that Bendix and Studebaker and the nylon division of Du Pont, and the University of Chicago, or Columbia or Harvard or Kenyon College, have once more proved mightier than the single soul of an individual; to find that one more lightly manned position has been taken. But what a great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr. Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries. People too thoroughly determined and our institutions by their size and force too thoroughly determined can’t approach this quality. That can only be done by those who resist the heavy influences and make their own synthesis out of the vast mass of phenomena, the seething, swarming body of appearances, facts, and details. From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, a writer tries to rescue what is important. Even when he is most bitter, he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect: There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. This tone, in the best pages of Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England philanthropist, comes through very powerfully; it is tragic-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence. In a time of specialized intelligence’s, modern imaginative writers make the effort to maintain themselves as unspecialists, and their quest is for a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone. What language is it that we can all speak, and what is it that we can all recognize, burn at, weep over, what is the stature we can without exaggeration claim for ourselves; what is the main address of consciousness?
I was keenly aware, as I read this book, of a very significant kind of independence in the writing. For there is a way for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr. Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone.
Negro Harlem is at once primitive and sophisticated; it exhibits the extremes of instinct and civilization as few other American communities do. If a writer dwells on the peculiarity of this, he ends with an exotic effect. And Mr. Ellison is not exotic. For him this balance of instinct and culture or civilization is not a Harlem matter; it is the matter, German, French, Russian, American, universal, a matter very little understood. It is thought that Negroes and other minority people, kept under in the great status battle, are in the instinct cellar of dark enjoyment. This imagined enjoyment provokes envious rage and murder; and then it is a large portion of human nature itself which becomes the fugitive murderously pursued. In our society Man Himself is idolized and publicly worshipped, but the single individual must hide himself underground and try to save his desires, his thoughts, his soul, in invisibility. He must return to himself, learning self-acceptance and rejecting all that threatens to deprive him of his manhood.
This is what I make of Invisible Man. It is not by any means faultless; I don’t think the hero’s experiences in the Communist party are as original in conception as other parts of the book, and his love affair with a white woman is all too brief, but it is an immensely moving novel and it has greatness.
So many hands have been busy at the interment of the novel the hand of Paul Valery, the hands of the editors of literary magazines, of scholars who decide when genres come and go, the hands of innumerable pip-squeaks as well that I cant help feeling elated when a resurrection occurs. People read history and then seem to feel that everything has to conclude in their own time. We have read history, and therefore history is over, they appear to say. Really, all that such critics have the right to say is that fine novels are few and far between; That’s perfectly true. But then fine anythings are few and far between. If these Critics wanted to be extremely truthful, they’d say they were bored. Boredom, of course, like any mighty force, you must respect. There is something terribly impressive about the boredom of a man like Valery who could no longer bear to read that the carriage had come for the duchess at four in the afternoon. And certainly there are some notably boring things to which we owe admiration of a sort.
Not all the gravediggers of the novel have such distinction as Valery’s, however. Hardly. And it’s difficult to think of them as rising dazzled from a volume of Stendhal, exclaiming God! and then with angry determination seizing their shovels to go and heap more clods on the coffin. No, theirs unfortunately isn’t often the disappointment of spirits formed under the influence of the masters. They make you wonder how, indeed, they would be satisfied. A recent contributor to _Partisan Review_, for instance, complains that modern fiction does not keep pace with his swift-wheeling modern consciousness which apparently leaves the photon far behind in its speed. He names a few really modern writers of fiction, their work unfortunately still unpublished, and makes a patronizing reference to Invisible Man: almost, but not quite, the real thing, it is raw and “overambitious.” And the editors of __Partisan Review_ who have published so much of this modern fiction that their contributor attacks, what do they think of this? They do not say what they think; neither of this piece nor of another lulu on the same subject and in the same issue by John Aldridge. Mr. Aldridge writes: There are only two cultural pockets left in America; and they are the Deep South and that area of northeastern United States whose moral capital is Boston, Massachusetts. This is to say that these are the only places where there are any manners. In all other parts of the country people live in a kind of vastly standardized cultural prairie, a sort of infinite Middle West, and that means that they don’t really live and they don’t really do anything.
Most Americans thus are Invisible. Can we wonder at the cruelty of dictators when even a literary critic, without turning a hair. announces the death of a hundred million people? Let us suppose that the novel is, as they say, played out. Let us only suppose it, for I don’t believe it. But what if it is so? Will such tasks as Mr. Ellison has set himself no more be performed? Nonsense. New means, when new means are necessary, will be found. To find them is easier than to suit the disappointed consciousness and to penetrate the thick walls of boredom within which life lies dying.
Bellow, Saul. “Man Underground”Review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Commentary. June 1952. pp. 608-610. 31 May 2007. 2 March 2008.
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/bellow-on-ellison.html
READ: Excerpts from: Ernest Kaiser, “A Critical Look at Ellison’s Fiction & at Social & Literary Criticism by and about the Author.” Black World. December 1970 [a special Ralph Ellison issue]). 31 May 2007. .
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: WHEN READING THIS NOVEL, CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:
HISTORICAL TIMELINE:
OTHER ARTIST THAT RELATE TO RALPH ELLISON
OTHER WRITERS THAT RELATE TO RALPH ELLISON
CIVIL RIGHTS
GLOBAL SOCIETY
CHARACTERS
LITERARY ELEMENTS
SYMBOLISM
MOTIFS
METAPHORS
MASK
THEMES
VOCABULARY: How can you REMEMBER AND USE NEW VOCABULARY WORDS?
(Tip 1) Individually or as a group, choose words that are unknown to you from the list. To help memorize, look up and write down the definition, part of speech and use the new word in a sentence of more than 6 words.
(Tip 2) Write a story, postcard, letter or journal entry using 15-25 words in context.
(Tip 3) Working individually or in a group, pair synonyms and/or antonyms. Determine how many words are adjectives, nouns and verbs. Remember, vocabulary mastery comes from encountering new words in assigned reading, in studying vocabulary word lists and using words in context.
***********************************************************************************EXTRA CREDIT: - Define Twenty (20): Vocabulary from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison .
Vocabulary appears in order of appearance, as indicated:
Introduction: defunct, inception, catalyst, baffling, affluent, ostensibly, speculation, sundry, flamboyant, ruthless, provocative, sally, ploy, elicit, benighted, provincialism, benign, metropolis, furtive, implacable, tenacity, grist, nebulous, turbulent, vacillating, astute, vaunted, chastened, metamorphosis
Prologue: epidermis, hoax, boomerang, yokel
Chapters 1-5: extol, injunction, fervor, nuance, (2) drone, trusting, plaintively, feeble, confound, sullenly, clamber, incantatory, covey, strident, riveted, intone, brogues, agape, (3) gesticulate, rowdy, balustrade, catharsis, rampant, (4) livid, compulsion, feudal, benign, (5) vespers, exhort, quaver, impunity, imperious, disembowelment
Chapters 6-10: (9) helical, doleful, fitfully, coup de grace, rookery, (10) scabs, hydrometer, sabotage, natty, snickering, blandly, irrevocably
Chapters 11-15: (11) drone, sorghum, protruding, luminous, waggishly, myopically, torpid, syphon, fretting, palaver, (12) spats, homburg, chesterfield, dunned, nebulous, (13) sullenly, trudge, eviction, cataract, trusty, ofay, vestibule, nonchalance, malicious, lethargically, fyce, repress, eloquence, verbiage, defunct, articulate, smug, indignant, (14) brooding, peal, imperious, emphatically, (15) pince-nez, impertinence, indignantly, exhilarated
Chapters 16-20: (16) synchronize, disputation, caucus, dialectics, exaltation, (17) hoodlum, heckler, zoot-suit, strumpet, perfidity, ramshackle, piety, (18) nebulous, belligerent, evasive, blighting, (19) barrage, volatile, (20) pomade, disperse
Chapters 21-25 and Epilogue: (21) spiel, piteously, euphonium, huckster (22) dialectical, amorphous, (23) veer, antiphonal, debunk, morbid, (24) tenacious (25) eloquence, (Epilogue) aspire, feudal, affirm, albino, infinite, chaos
EXTRA CREDIT: CREATE A NOVEL PERIOD POSTCARD (FRONT AND BACK) TO INCLUDE THE STAMP, ADDRESS TO AND FROM - USING A MAIN CHARACTER TO ELUCIDATE A LITERARY ELEMENT/THEME- MOTIF - FROM THE NOVEL INVISIBLE MAN. BE CREATE - ARTICULATE - AND DEMONSTRATE YOUR WRITING STYLE, TO INCLUDE THREE VOCABULARY WORDS FROM THE LIST ABOVE. DUE: MC TEST DAY.
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TASK: WRITE /TYPE ON A SEPARATE SHEET - AN AP STYLE QUESTION FOR RALPH ELLISON’S NOVEL - INVISIBLE MAN. DUE: SS DAY.
MODEL: 2003 AP QUESTION: Novels and plays often depict characters caught between colliding cultures - national - regional - ethnic - religious - institutional. Such collisions can call a character’s sense of identity into question. Select a novel or play in which a character responds to such a cultural collision. Then, write a well-organized essay in which you describe the character’s response and explain its relevance to the work as a whole. Choice: Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
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Thus, Invisible Man shows how the struggles of the narrator as an individual and as a representative of an ethnic minority are paralleled by the struggle of the nation to define and redefine itself. Ellison’s frequently expressed opinion that African-American culture’s assimilation by the dominant culture of the United States is inevitable and salutary has led some African-American critics to attack him as reactionary. The suspicion that he has “sold out” has also been fed by his broad popularity among white readers and his acceptance of teaching positions at predominantly white universities.
“Thoughts from Ellison” - critiqued by Addison Gayle - with response to Ralph Ellison’s listening to: Louis Armstrong’s recording of:
“What Did I Do to Be so Black …>
