Wrestling with the Left , livre ebook

463

pages

English

Ebooks

2010

Écrit par
Foley Barbara Foley

Publié par
Duke University Press

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463

pages

English

Ebooks

2010

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

03 décembre 2010

EAN13

9780822393276

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

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of pages of drafts and notes for the novel, as well as the author's early journalism and fiction, published and unpublished.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.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

03 décembre 2010

EAN13

9780822393276

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

wrestlingwiththeleft

BARBARA FOLEY

Duke University Press Durham and London 2010 ·

LEFT WITH THE

The Making of

Ralph Ellison’s

Invisible Man

WRESTLING

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paper ♾

Typeset in Iowan Oldstyle

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

o The Two eTeRs

Acknowledgmentsix

Note on the Textxi

Introduction: Reading Forward toInvisible Man1

Pàrt I

1. Forming a Politics27

2. Developing an Aesthetic69

3. Writing from the Left109

Pàrt II

4. Living Jim Crow153

5. Becoming Proletarian187

6. Finding Brotherhood237

7. Recognizing Necessity281

8. Beginning and Ending325

Notes351

Selected Bibliography429

Index433

contents

This book has been in the making for many years during which I have accrued debts to many friends, colleagues, and comrades. Apologizing for the impersonality of this alphabetical listing, I wish to thank the following people: Jonathan Auerbach; Sterling Bland; Patricia Carter; Neil Chesanow; Brian Dolinar; Kathy Fischer; Peter Foley; H. Bruce Franklin; Grover Furr; Peter Gardner; Donald Gibson; Laura Gray-Rosendale; Rodney Green; Gerald Horne; David Hoddeson; Lawrence Jackson; David Laibman; William Maxwell; Gregory Meyerson; Bill Mullen; Joseph Ramsey; Dick Reavis; Brian Roberts; James Smethurst; Adam Stevens; Houston Stevens; Margaret Stevens; Virginia Tiger; Alan Wald; Fengzhen Wang; Mary Helen Washington. Various groups of people have stimulated my thinking about Elli-son in particular and twentieth-century culture, politics and history in general: fellow-members of the Marxist Literary Group; colleagues on the manuscript collective atScience & Society; the students in my classes at Rutgers University-Newark. I am especially grateful to two scholars who helped bring this study to fruition. John F. Callahan, literary executor of the Ellison estate, gave me access to a number of restricted texts as well as permission to quote extensively from the Ellison papers. Without his generous con-sent, this book would not have been possible. Arnold Rampersad al-lowed me to see a pre-publication copy of hisRalph Ellison: A Biography, thereby eliminating the nine months I would have had to wait to read his invaluable biography. Reynolds Smith of the Duke University Press has been kind and patient during the long gestation of this study; Sharon Torian and Neal McTighe have been consistently aable, competent, and eîcient throughout the production process.

acknowledgments

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