The Politics           of the Poison Pen:           Communism, Caricature,           and Scapegoats 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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