The Politics of Carnival and Heteroglossia in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man:

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

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A Deep Pocket for the Truth of the Times

10.1093/oso/9780190682088.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Germana

Keyword(s):

Music Criticism ◽

Invisible Man ◽

The Past ◽

Historical View ◽

Sense Of Time ◽

Cultural Forms ◽

The Times ◽

Musical Forms

Chapter 5 treats Ellison’s music criticism as an expression of his commitment to durational time and a critique of cultural forms like bebop that, in Ellison’s estimation, lend form to a discontinuous present. Rather than suggest, as many critics have, that Ellison was simply nostalgic for danceable swing music or hostile toward emerging musical forms, this chapter shows that Ellison’s primary criticism of bebop is that it formalizes a discontinuous sense of time and thereby affirms an historical view of the past structured by an analogous, sequentially static sense of time. Ellison’s problem with bebop, in other words, is neither musicological nor sociological, but temporal. Folk jazz and the blues, by contrast, affirm a durational view of time in the form of a “pocket” or groove entirely unlike the spatialized groove of history described in Invisible Man. In short, Ellison finds in musical grooves antidotes to the groove of history.

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Peristrephic Visions

10.1093/oso/9780190682088.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Germana

Keyword(s):

Temporal Logic ◽

White Supremacist ◽

Invisible Man ◽

The Future

Chapter 2 examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a text that ekphrastically simulates a moving or “peristrephic” panorama in general, and an antebellum antislavery panorama in particular. In the process, this chapter reads Ellison’s debut novel as a text indebted to and allusive of, while ironically commenting on, the life and career of celebrated fugitive and peristrephic panoramist Henry Box Brown, who shipped himself in a sealed wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia and thus from slavery to freedom in 1849. Brown’s subsequent efforts to navigate the terrain of abolitionist discourse within a white supremacist culture led him to create a moving panorama called the Mirror of Slavery, which chronicled the cruelties of slavery, yet ended with the promise of universal emancipation. In appropriating the visual grammar of the antislavery panorama, Ellison also extends its ambivalent temporal logic to create his own alternative history in service of the future.

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ReAction!

10.1093/oso/9780195326925.001.0001 ◽

2009 ◽

Author(s):

Mark A. Griep ◽

Marjorie L. Mikasen

Keyword(s):

Drug Discovery ◽

Chemical Weapons ◽

Trial And Error ◽

Discovery Process ◽

Drug Discovery Process ◽

Special Effects ◽

Invisible Man ◽

Feature Films ◽

The World ◽

Chemical Companies

ReAction! gives a scientist's and artist's response to the dark and bright sides of chemistry found in 140 films, most of them contemporary Hollywood feature films but also a few documentaries, shorts, silents, and international films. Even though there are some examples of screen chemistry between the actors and of behind-the-scenes special effects, this book is really about the chemistry when it is part of the narrative. It is about the dualities of Dr. Jekyll vs. inventor chemists, the invisible man vs. forensic chemists, chemical weapons vs. classroom chemistry, chemical companies that knowingly pollute the environment vs. altruistic research chemists trying to make the world a better place to live, and, finally, about people who choose to experiment with mind-altering drugs vs. the drug discovery process. Little did Jekyll know when he brought the Hyde formula to his lips that his personality split would provide the central metaphor that would come to describe chemistry in the movies. This book explores the two movie faces of this supposedly neutral science. Watching films with chemical eyes, Dr. Jekyll is recast as a chemist engaged in psychopharmaceutical research but who becomes addicted to his own formula. He is balanced by the often wacky inventor chemists who make their discoveries by trial-and-error.

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