Reading Invisible Man

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course considers Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel "Invisible Man" within and against the literary, philosophical, and vernacular traditions that influenced its composition. Not only will we read Ellison’s writings (both fiction and non-fiction) in detail, we will also examine many of the cultural sources on which "Invisible Man" draws: music by Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Rushing, and Charlie Parker; fiction by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Wright, Mark Twain, Ann Petry, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; and writings by Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and T.S. Eliot. We will have two main goals throughout the course of the semester: first, to understand Ellison’s complex vision of the African American experience; second, to understand the centrality of that experience to modern American life and art.