Ross Posnock

The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison

List of figures List of contributors Chronology Introduction: Ellisons joking Ross Posnock 1. Ralph Ellisons invented life: a meeting with ancestors Lawrence Jackson 2. Ellison and the black Church: the gospel according to Ralph Laura Saunders 3. Ellison, photography and the origins of invisibility Sara Blair 4. Ralph Ellisons music lessons Paul Allen Anderson 5. Ralph Ellisons constitutional faith Gregg Crane 6. Ralph Ellison and the politics of melancholia Anne Anlin Cheng 7. Invisible Ellison: the fight to be a Negro leader Tim Parrish 8. Ellisons experimental attitude and the technologies of illumination John S. Wright 9. Female iconography in Invisible Man Shelly Eversley 10. Chaos not quite controlled: Ellisons uncompleted transit to Juneteenth Kenneth W. Warren 11. Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt and the meaning of politics Ross Posnock 12. Dry bones Eric J. Sundquist Selected bibliography and suggestions for further reading Index.

Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, and the meaning of politics

Bringing Ellison and Arendt together could well comprise a chapter on yet another failed interaction between black and Jewish intellectuals. After all, on the two occasions when Ellison publically mentions Arendt it is in a less than favorable light. At the start of The World and the Jug, his compelling skewering of Irving Howe, Ellison remarks that Howes earlier critique of Ellison is written with something of the Olympian authority that characterized Hannah Arendts Reflections on Little Rock in the Winter 1959 issue of Howes Dissent . Ellison is referring to her notorious misreading of black parents attempts at integrating segregated grade schools as a parvenu effort at social climbing. Ellisons phrase Olympian authority should not be construed as a compliment; it is his sarcastic euphemism for the arrogance of those such as Howe and Arendt who would tell us the meaning of Negro life without ever bothering to learn how varied it really is. Evidently Howe feels that unrelieved suffering is the only real Negro experience, and that the true Negro writer must be ferocious ( Collected Essays 159).

Ellison and the black Church

The point is, that like yourself, I existed in a field of influences . . . Three decades after a furious Ralph Ellison wrote this to his friend, the well-known critic Stanley Edgar Hyman in 1970, its evident that this view has prevailed. Ellisons field of influences – which for Hyman consisted only of racial oppression and other African-American writers – is now furrowed with discussions of his debts not only to Richard Wright but also to Kenneth Burke, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, and others. Yet one extraordinary influence remains overlooked: it is the debt Ellison owes what may loosely be called the black Church, and its role in the vision he at times fiercely opposed to that of Hyman and others. With the 1999 publication of Juneteenth this debt can no longer be ignored. Although Juneteenth is not, strictly speaking, Ellisons own second novel – he died in 1994, leaving it unfinished after forty years of effort – it is nevertheless his work, fashioned by his literary executor from Ellisons highly-polished narrative nuggets, some of which he published during his life. While we cant know how he would have assembled his own novel, its hero is clearly A. Z. Hickman, a Negro preacher who takes the Gospel as seriously as Ellison means readers to take Hickman himself. It is also clear that a pivotal chapter, both of Ellisons work-in-progress and Juneteenth , depicts Hickmans Christian conversion.

The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity.

In this important revisionist study, Posnock integrates literary and psychological criticism with social and cultural theory to make a major advance in our understanding of the life and thought of two great American figures, Henry and William James. Challenging canonical images of both brothers, Posnock is the first to place them in a rich web of cultural and intellectual affiliations comprised of a host of American and European theorists of modernity. A startlingly new Henry James emerges from a cross-disciplinary dialogue, which features Veblen, Santayana, Bourne, and Dewey, as well as Weber, Simmel, Benjamin, and Adorno.