Ritual and Rationalization: Black Folklore in the Works of Ralph Ellison

PMLA ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Blake
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Folk Tradition ◽  
The Human Condition

From his early short stories through his as yet unpublished second novel, Ralph Ellison pursues the theme of the quest for black self-definition by reference to black folklore. “In the folklore,” he says, “we tell what Negro experience really is.” Ellison adapts black folklore to fiction by fitting it into the forms of American and Western myth. As he enlarges the context of black folk tradition, he reduces the importance of its basis in racial oppression and conflict and transforms its social meaning into the metaphysical meanings of the framing myths. Thus black identity becomes indistinguishable from American identity or the human condition, and the effort to define it from within results instead in continued definition by the enslaving society.

Camus and Tragedy in Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Apparent Absence ◽  
The World ◽  
Educational Imagination ◽  
The Human Condition

Tragedy is a central theme in the work of Albert Camus that speaks to his 46 years of life in “interesting times.” He develops a case for the tragic arts across a series of letters, articles, lectures, short stories, and novels. In arguing for the tragic arts, he reveals an epic understanding of the tensions between individual and world manifest in the momentum of liberalism, humanism, and modernism. The educational qualities of the tragic arts are most explicitly explored in his novel The Plague, in which the proposition that the plague is a teacher engages Camus in an exploration of the grand narratives of progress and freedom, and the intimate depths of ignorance and heroism. In the novel The Outsider Camus explores the tragedy of difference in a society obsessed with the production of a normal citizen. The tragedy manifests the absurdity of the world in which a stranger in this world is compelled to support the system that rejects their subjectivity. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus produces an essay on absurdity and suicide that toys with the illusion of Progress and the grounds for a well-lived life. Across these texts, and through his collection of letters, articles, and notes, Camus invites an educational imagination. His approach to study of the human condition in and through tragedy offers a narrative to challenge the apparent absence of imagination in educational systems and agendas. Following Camus, the tragic arts offer alternative narratives during the interesting times of viral and environment tragedy.

“That Pause for Contemplation”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Callahan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Father Figures ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

In “’That Pause for Contemplation’: A Centennial Meditation on Ralph Ellison,” John Callahan—Ellison’s literary executor and the dean of Ellison studies—looks back upon Ellison’s life and work, asking what Ellison’s accomplishment looks like 100 years after his birth, and a new century proceeds in his wake. Beginning with the “thought experiment” of a young Barack Obama jogging past Ralph Ellison in New York in the 1980s, Callahan meditates on Ellison’s investigation of the relationship between the individual search for identity and America’s pursuit of democratic equality. Drawing upon Ellison’s wealth of posthumously published material—the short stories, essays, interviews, and his unfinished second novel—Callahan emphasizes Ellison’s relentless pursuit of the novel form as his means of interrogating the fluid, improvisational, evolving form of American identity. Callahan probes the omnipresent father figures that dominate Ellison’s work after Invisible Man—Lewis Ellison, Abraham Lincoln, Alonzo Hickman, and others.

scholarly journals “Foran loven”

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-278
Author(s):  
Aldona Zańko
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Universal Truth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract The novel The trial, telling the story of the groundless arrest and prosecution of the bank clerk Josef K., remains one of the bestknown and most influential works written by Franz Kafka. Depicting the pointless struggle of a man placed at the mercy of a remote, inaccessible authority, it gives a symbolic account of the human condition in the modern era, characterised by the lack of universal truth, estrangement, confusion and existential impotence. Grasping the very idea of existential modernity, the novel provides ongoing inspiration for a great number of modernist and postmodernist writers all over the world, including Scandinavia. In the article presented below, The trial is examined as an intertext within the genre of the Scandinavian short prose, as it unfolds at breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism. Starting with the literary and critical works of the Danish modernist Villy Sørensen, and moving forward throughout the Danish and Norwegian minimalism of the 1990's, the paper discusses a range of different aspects of The trial, as they reappear in the short stories written by some of the main representatives of the Scandinavian short story. In this way, the article elucidates the relevance of Kafka's novel as an intertext for contemporary Scandinavian short fiction, as well as draws attention to the dialogical dimension of the genre.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Career Trajectory ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Australian Science ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Fiction Writer ◽  
The Human Condition

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on the work of Australian science fiction (SF) author Greg Egan. At the time of this writing Egan has published twelve novels and sixty shorter stories. Over time we can chart a clear career trajectory that any author could be proud of: an early mix of successes and rejections, slowly finding his core themes and audience, getting published regularly, showing up in Year's Best anthologies, getting award nominations, moving from short stories to novels, and winning major awards. There is no doubt that what Egan writes is near the heart of contemporary SF and hard SF. More than any other contemporary science fiction writer, he has set himself a project of raising science's profile through art—to convince people that science is as important and critical to the human condition as romance or religion.

scholarly journals Américanité et quête identitaire dans La Montagne secrète de Gabrielle Roy

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nova Doyon
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gabrielle Roy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
English Canadian ◽  
Geographical Space ◽  
The Human Condition

Dans les romans et nouvelles de Gabrielle Roy qui ont pour cadre le territoire nordique canadien, l’espace géographique constitue une source d’apprentissage, de prise de conscience, de transformation pour certains personnages. La présente analyse se consacrera à La Montagne secrète pour montrer comment le roman, publié en 1961, réactive un certain nombre de mythes fondateurs de l’imaginaire américain et fait de l’expérience continentale le lieu d’une interrogation personnelle sur le rapport à soi et aux autres. Si la nature sauvage et les grands espaces constituent la source d’inspiration du peintre-trappeur Pierre Cadorai, c’est l’exploration de la condition humaine qui donne sens à sa quête. Proposant une représentation originale de l’espace canadien, La Montagne secrète témoigne d’une réinterprétation du rapport symbolique au territoire sur le mode non plus collectif mais individuel et participe en ce sens à la constitution d’un nouvel imaginaire territorial revendiqué par les institutions littéraires tant québécoise que canadienne-anglaise. Abstract In Gabrielle Roy’s novels and short stories set in the Canadian Northern Territory, geographical space appears as a source for learning, awareness and transformation for certain characters. This analysis will focus on La Montagne secrète to show how the novel, published in 1961, revives a number of founding myths of the American imaginary and turns the continental experience into an opportunity to question one’s relation to oneself and others. If the painter-trapper Pierre Cadorai finds inspiration in wilderness and vast spaces, it is the exploration of the human condition that gives sense to his quest. Proposing an original representation of Canadian space, La Montagne secrète bears witness to a reinterpretation of the symbolic connection with the territory from the individual rather than the collective viewpoint and participates in this sense in the constitution of a new territorial imaginary claimed by both Quebec and English-Canadian literary institutions.

Towards an Environmental Anthropology

1995 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Environmental Anthropology ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Human Condition

With more than half of the anthropological community working outside of academia and a growing number of academic practitioners focusing their intellectual energies and efforts on the definition, analysis, and resolution of nonacademic problems, the social meaning and impact of our discipline has changed. Our endeavors are increasingly lodged in the problems of humanity, our intent to better the human condition. Anthropological praxis—what we do, how we do what we do, why we do it, and the effects of our work—represents the critical and controversial issues of our discipline today.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

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