The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison

by Ross Posnock (Editor)

Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides the most up-to-date introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features newly commissioned essays, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays recover the compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison's political and artistic vision. Students and scholars of American and African-American literature will find this work invaluable.

Genres: Literary Criticism

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[V Mignon · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there is anything I have learned from Ross Posnock's The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, it is that I must read all of Ralph Ellison's work. Reading Invisible Man gifted me with an incredible book that changed the way I regard others - "But do they really see me?" is often the question circling in my head when the religious are proselytizing at me. Posnock's collection of essays taught me that Ralph Ellison was one of the most important writers of his time. Okay, I'll say it, because it's on my mind: perhaps of this time as well. Even the most minute of comments included in these essays from Ellison's work make me feel as if I have to find his non-fiction work. It's imperative. As an American.

The essays within this collection cover topics within Invisible Man, Ellison's unfinished posthumous novel Juneteenth, his body of non-fiction, and his life. I have learned so much about Ellison's life and why he would have focused on the ideas that he did from reading this collection alone. There's one essay that covers Ellison's fascination with father figures, of the Golden-Bough type, stories where the king has died but his presence lingers. Such as in Hamlet. Such as with Abraham Lincoln.

The unfortunate thing about being a hermit crab and an English major is that it's difficult to work with only your perspective. If I were more dedicated to searching out discussion, perhaps I would have seen more in Invisible Man, but Posnock has provided that for me from academics who are truly insightful beings. My personal favorites were Sara Blair's Ellison, photography, and the origins of invisibility and Anne Anling Chen's Ralph Ellison and the politics of melancholia. Blair explores Ellison's career as a photographer and the burgeoning image-culture of the 1950's. There's always this surge of documentation whenever photography becomes more accessible to the public. Cameras were newly accessible to the public then, and Ellison was able to create one from parts he had found. Which still sounds so ingenious to me. Chen's essay utilized Sigmund Freud's Mourning and Melancholia in a way that made it sound fresh to me, on the topics of identity and visibility.

If you want an understanding of who Ellison was as a writer, social critic, and literary critic, then this is the best first step you can take. I was expecting essays that simply analyzed Invisible Man and found myself staying up late, wanting to read more about Ellison's parents. As an edited collection, I think Posnock did an incredible job, because ending on Eric J. Sundquist's Dry bones leaves the question of identity and Ellison's moral quandaries open.

"When I discover who I am, I'll be free."