Read more
Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist examines Ralph Ellison's body of work as an extended and ever-evolving expression of the author's philosophy of temporalitya philosophy synthesized from the writings of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche that anticipates the work of Gilles Deleuze. Germana presents Ellison's theory of temporality and social change as going up against all forms of linear causality and historical determinisma theory that views time as a multiplicity of dynamic processes, rather than a static container for the events of our lives. Integral to this theory is Ellison's observation that the social, cultural, and legal processes constitutive of racial formation are embedded in static temporalities reiterated by historians and sociologists. In other words, Ellison's critique of US racial history is, fundamentally, a matter of time. This book shows how Ellison's fiction, criticism, and photography reclaims technologies through which static time and linear history are formalizedin effect, revealing intensities implicit in the present that, if actualized, could help us "act un-historically." The result is a reinterpretation of Ellison's oeuvre, as well as an extension of Ellison's ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future. Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist reveals the chaos of possibility lurking beneath the patterns of living we mistake for enduring certainties.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Section I: Overture
- Chapter 1. Time, History, and Becoming in Invisible Man
- Section II: Vision
- Chapter 2. Peristrephic Visions: Henry Box Brown, Ralph Ellison, and the Panoramic Logic of Invisible Man
- Chapter 3. Rhopographic Photography and Atemporal Cinema: The Link Between Ralph Ellison's Polaroids and Three Days Before the Shooting...
- Section III: Sound
- Chapter 4. "Modulate, Daddy, Modulate!": Polyrhythms and Metric Modulation in the Fiction of Ralph Ellison
- Chapter 5. A Deep Pocket for the Truth of the Times: Ellison's Other Groove of History
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Michael Germana is Associate Professor at West Virginia University.
Summary
Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist elucidates the theory of temporality that binds Ellison's oeuvre together, and explains why race is a matter of time. Germana offers a wholesale reinterpretation of Ellison's corpus as well as an extension of Ellison's ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future.
Additional text
After the death of Ralph Ellison in 1994 there has been a gradual and necessary reassessment of his achievement, accelerated by the publication of his long-awaited second novel Three Days Before the Shooting. Despite the fame he achieved as the author of Invisible Man, Ellison's complexity and significance as an artist and a thinker remains largely undescribed. Michael Germana's Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist provides a major re-evaluation of Ellison's accomplishments, and is the essential starting point for the new Ellison studies.
Report
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Choice
