Narration on the Lower Frequencies in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Chapter 5 treats Ellison’s music criticism as an expression of his commitment to durational time and a critique of cultural forms like bebop that, in Ellison’s estimation, lend form to a discontinuous present. Rather than suggest, as many critics have, that Ellison was simply nostalgic for danceable swing music or hostile toward emerging musical forms, this chapter shows that Ellison’s primary criticism of bebop is that it formalizes a discontinuous sense of time and thereby affirms an historical view of the past structured by an analogous, sequentially static sense of time. Ellison’s problem with bebop, in other words, is neither musicological nor sociological, but temporal. Folk jazz and the blues, by contrast, affirm a durational view of time in the form of a “pocket” or groove entirely unlike the spatialized groove of history described in Invisible Man. In short, Ellison finds in musical grooves antidotes to the groove of history.

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Peristrephic Visions

10.1093/oso/9780190682088.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Germana

Keyword(s):

Temporal Logic ◽

White Supremacist ◽

Invisible Man ◽

The Future

Chapter 2 examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a text that ekphrastically simulates a moving or “peristrephic” panorama in general, and an antebellum antislavery panorama in particular. In the process, this chapter reads Ellison’s debut novel as a text indebted to and allusive of, while ironically commenting on, the life and career of celebrated fugitive and peristrephic panoramist Henry Box Brown, who shipped himself in a sealed wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia and thus from slavery to freedom in 1849. Brown’s subsequent efforts to navigate the terrain of abolitionist discourse within a white supremacist culture led him to create a moving panorama called the Mirror of Slavery, which chronicled the cruelties of slavery, yet ended with the promise of universal emancipation. In appropriating the visual grammar of the antislavery panorama, Ellison also extends its ambivalent temporal logic to create his own alternative history in service of the future.

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ReAction!

10.1093/oso/9780195326925.001.0001 ◽

2009 ◽

Author(s):

Mark A. Griep ◽

Marjorie L. Mikasen

Keyword(s):

Drug Discovery ◽

Chemical Weapons ◽

Trial And Error ◽

Discovery Process ◽

Drug Discovery Process ◽

Special Effects ◽

Invisible Man ◽

Feature Films ◽

The World ◽

Chemical Companies

ReAction! gives a scientist's and artist's response to the dark and bright sides of chemistry found in 140 films, most of them contemporary Hollywood feature films but also a few documentaries, shorts, silents, and international films. Even though there are some examples of screen chemistry between the actors and of behind-the-scenes special effects, this book is really about the chemistry when it is part of the narrative. It is about the dualities of Dr. Jekyll vs. inventor chemists, the invisible man vs. forensic chemists, chemical weapons vs. classroom chemistry, chemical companies that knowingly pollute the environment vs. altruistic research chemists trying to make the world a better place to live, and, finally, about people who choose to experiment with mind-altering drugs vs. the drug discovery process. Little did Jekyll know when he brought the Hyde formula to his lips that his personality split would provide the central metaphor that would come to describe chemistry in the movies. This book explores the two movie faces of this supposedly neutral science. Watching films with chemical eyes, Dr. Jekyll is recast as a chemist engaged in psychopharmaceutical research but who becomes addicted to his own formula. He is balanced by the often wacky inventor chemists who make their discoveries by trial-and-error.

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19. Ellison’s Invisible Man

The Explicator ◽

10.1080/00144940.1970.11482962 ◽

1970 ◽

Vol 29 (3) ◽

pp. 35-37

Author(s):

J. D. Bell

Keyword(s):

Invisible Man

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Fossil Record of Parasitism on Marine Invertebrates with Special Emphasis on the Platyceratid-Crinoid Interaction

The Paleontological Society Papers ◽

10.1017/s1089332600001091 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 8 ◽

pp. 195-210 ◽

Cited By ~ 33

Author(s):

Tomasz K. Baumiller ◽

Forest J. Gahn

Keyword(s):

Fossil Record ◽

Marine Invertebrates ◽

Marine Diversity ◽

Parasitic Interactions ◽

Explicit Criteria ◽

Lower Frequencies

The paleontological literature on marine invertebrates is rich in supposed examples of parasitism and our tabulation shows a nearly even distribution of reported cases through the post-Cambrian Phanerozoic. Slightly lower frequencies characterize the Triassic and Jurassic and higher frequencies the Cretaceous and Tertiary, and the pattern roughly mirrors Sepkoski's (1984) marine diversity curve. The total number of parasitic associations for any geologic period rarely exceeds a dozen, yet few of the reported examples provide explicit criteria distinguishing parasitism from predation, commensalism, or mutualism. We evaluated the published examples using the following criteria: (1) evidence of a long-term relationship between two organisms, (2) benefit of interaction to supposed parasite, and (3) detriment of interaction to the host We found that only in exceptional cases were these criteria fulfilled. One example that provides much information on parasitic interactions involves platyceratids and crinoids and we summarize the evidence for the parasitic interaction between these two groups of organisms.

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