Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist

by Michael Germana

Overview

Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist examines Ralph Ellison's body of work as an extended and ever-evolving expression of the author's philosophy of temporality-a philosophy synthesized from the writings of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche that anticipates the work of Gilles Deleuze. Author Michael Germana presents Ellison's theory of temporality and social change as going up against all forms of linear causality and historical determinism-a 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. Germana posits that Ellison's critique of U.S. 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 formalized-in 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190682088
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/02/2018
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Michael Germana is Associate Professor at West Virginia University.

Table 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

Editorial Reviews

"Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." — Choice

"Michael Germana's Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist argues for a new understanding of Ellison's sense of time. Really, it argues for a new sense of Ellison, one that overturns a good many established critical positions. This is a learned book, at times a difficult book. But it is never cold; it retains a sense of soul, inspired perhaps by the fact that Germana is not simply a literary critic but also a jazz drummer. That rhythmic sensibility is apparent in the book's structure, the shape of its arguments, even the sequence of its sentences. What emerges is a new conception of one of the 20th century's leading author-intellectuals, one that accounts for the totality of Ellison's literary production." —Adam Bradley, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Ralph Ellison in Progress

"Ralph Ellison: Temporal Technologist is a finely nuanced, theoretically informed reading of Ellison's sense of time and historical subjectivity. Exploring an array of visual and sonic paradigms, Michael Germana brilliantly exposes the fecundity of stylistic and thematic tools with which Ellison refigured the racialized historical subject whose specter haunts the notion of American nationhood. This is the finest and most important work on Ellison to date." —Alan Nadel, University of Kentucky, author of Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon

"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." —Timothy Parrish, University of California, Davis and author of Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America

From the Publisher