Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man Discussing Narratives of Domestic Abuse and Gaslighting through the Cassandra Myth

Renowned for its hard-hitting exploration of gaslighting and domestic abuse, Leigh Whannell’s 2020 film The Invisible Man has inevitably been linked to the #MeToo movement. Despite the film’s contemporary premise, however, its narrative of male violence and female silencing is fundamentally rooted within classical literature and can be seen as an appropriation of the Cassandra myth. This article will be reviewing the continued relevance of the Cassandra myth today and the impact of her appearance within the horror movie genre. It will identify how Cassandra’s narrative as a truth-speaker, who is met with disbelief, has been appropriated for both thematic and critical effect. It will also consider the gendered implication of truth-speakers in horror and the impact of representing a female Cassandra onscreen to critique gendered issues, such as female silencing, domestic abuse, and gaslighting. By applying the classical figure of Cassandra to Whannell’s The Invisible Man, this article will continue by highlighting the patriarchal mechanisms which have historically dictated the reliability of female truth-speaker, thus connecting modern truth-speakers to their ancient counterparts.

Ralph Ellison in Context

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the second-most assigned American novel since 1945 and is one of the most enduring. It is studied by many thousands of high school and college students every year and has been since the 1950s. His landmark essays, with their blend of personal history and cultural theory, have been extraordinarily influential. Ralph Ellison in Context includes authoritative chapters summing up longstanding conversations, while offering groundbreaking essays on a variety of topics not yet covered in the copious critical and biographical literature. It provides fresh perspectives on some of the most important people and places in Ellison's life, and explores where his work and biography cross paths with some of the pressing topics of his time. It includes chapters on Ellison's literary influences and offers a definitive overview of his early writings. It also provides an overview of Ellison's reception and reputation from his death in 1994 through 2020.

The Traumatic Mark in Invisible Man

Invisible Man is the representative work of Ralph Ellison, a famous contemporary American black writer, which mainly describes the growing process of a black man. The aim of the thesis is to analyze the racial trauma that the protagonist experienced at school, in the factory and political group, the three kinds of symptoms after the trauma-hyperarousal, intrusion and constriction, and the result that the protagonist cannot recover from his trauma due to racial discrimination.

The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

“A Book One Can with Complete Confidence Call Important”: Albert Erskine, Ralph Ellison, and the Publishing of Invisible Man

In this article I examine the editing and publishing of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man by Albert Erskine. Over the course of the piece, I deploy letters, drafts, and other material drawn from both Ellison's archive in the Library of Congress and Erskine's own archive at the University of Virginia to unpack how Erskine, as a white editor at a powerful international publishing house, conceived of his role in shepherding to market and marketing what he saw as a major literary work by an African American author.

L’original bilingue, ou la traduction impossible : autour de « L’homme invisible / The Invisible Man » de Patrice Desbiens

Le récit/the story entitled Lʼhomme invisible / The Invisible Man (1981) by Patrice Desbiens, a bilingual Franco-Ontarian writer and poet, encourages us to reflect on a bilingual original and to rethink the relationship between the centre and the periphery in the translational context. Bilingualism is an integral part of the book: Patrice Desbiens builds his identities on “two mother tongues” by juxtaposing the two versions of his text. A detailed analysis of the story in French and English shows important differences between them. What is more, only a simultaneous reading of the two versions makes it possible to fully understand the idea of the story and the complicated relations between the two cultures. The article is a reflection on the impossibility of translating an original built on the presence of two languages, an inherent and specific feature of Desbiens’ text.