Barbara Foley

Wrestling with the left : the making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man

In Wrestling with the Left , Barbara Foley presents a penetrating analysis of the creation of Invisible Man . In the process she sheds new light not only on Ralph Ellison’s celebrated novel but also on his early radicalism and the relationship between African American writers and the left during the early years of the cold war. Foley scrutinized thousands of pages of drafts and notes for the novel, as well as the author’s early journalism and fiction, published and unpublished. While Ellison had cut his ties with the Communist left by the time he began Invisible Man in 1945, Foley argues that it took him nearly seven years to wrestle down his leftist consciousness (and conscience) and produce the carefully patterned cold war text that won the National Book Award in 1953 and has since become a widely taught American classic. She interweaves her account of the novel’s composition with the history of American Communism, linking Ellison’s political and artistic transformations to his distress at the Communists’ wartime policies, his growing embrace of American nationalism, his isolation from radical friends, and his recognition, as the cold war heated up, that an explicitly leftist writer could not expect to have a viable literary career. Foley suggests that by expunging a leftist vision from Invisible Man , Ellison rendered his novel not only less radical but also less humane than it might otherwise have been.

From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's“ Bartleby”

In recent years critics have been calling for a regrounding of mid-nineteenth-century American literature—of the romance in particular—in politics and history. John McWilliams applauds the contemporary ‘‘challenge to the boundaryless and abstract qualities of the older idea of the Romance’s neutral territory.’’ George Dekker notes that recent attempts to ‘‘rehistoricize the American romance’’ have entailed an ‘‘insist[ence] that our major romancers have always been profoundly concerned with whatmight be called themental or ideological ‘manners’ of American society, and that their seemingly anti-mimetic fictions both represent and criticize those manners.’’ 1 But Herman Melville’s ‘‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’’ (1853) has to this point been exempted from a thoroughgoing historical recontextualization; its subtitle remains to be fully explained. Not all readings of the tale, to be sure, have been ‘‘boundaryless and abstract.’’ Critics interested in the tale’s autobiographical dimension have interpreted it as an allegory of the writer’s fate in a market society, noting specific links with Melville’s own difficult authorial career. Scholars concerned with the story’s New York setting have discovered some important references to contemporaneous events. Marxist critics have argued that ‘‘Bartleby’’ offers a portrait of the increasing alienation of labor in the rationalized capitalist economy that took shape in themid-nineteenth-centuryUnited States. But such critical enterprises have remained largely separate, with the result that biography, historical contextualization, and ideological analysis have been pursued in different registers. Moreover, criticism of ‘‘Bar-

Jean Toomer's Sparta

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