The works of the nineteenth-century American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson continue to be inspiring particularly due to their empowering effect on the individual. It is especially Emerson's concepts of the sovereignty of the individual, the importance of self-definition, the view of life as a transitory flow, and the relationship between freedom and fate which can be practically and usefully applied in the life of an individual. It is possible, then, to understand and evaluate Emerson's works through the practical effects of his concepts, in other words through the prism of pragmatism. Emerson's empowering philosophy can be of use especially to disempowered groups such as African Americans. The Emersonian themes which are to be found in the works of various African-American non-fiction writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West testify to the relevance of Emerson for this minority group. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son, two African-American novels, Emersonian principles are shown to be of utmost importance for the positive development of the protagonists.

My research explores the interplay between the archival and aesthetic sensibilities of novelists not typically associated with archival practices--Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac. In juxtaposing their dual roles as public novelists and private archivists, I expose how their literary practices echo with core concepts in archival theory and position the novel as an alternative and superior site of historical preservation. Drawing on my experience as an archivist, I argue that the twentieth-century American novel's concern with inclusivity, preservation and posterity parallels archival science's changing approach to ephemera, arrangement, and diversity. The role of the archive in my work is both methodological and thematic: first, my own research incorporates these authors' cache of research materials, correspondence, drafts, diaries, and aborted or unpublished pieces, obtained during my visits to their various repositories. Second, I extricate the role of the archival in their fictions, and trace how their research, documentation, and classification practices inform their experiments with the novel form. I propose that all these vagabond masters of novelistic craft throw into relief the archive's positivist fallibility while also stressing its creative mutability.

This thesis is an analysis of Ralph Ellison’s use of color terminology in his novel, Invisible Man. By taking an in depth look at the circumstances in which Ellison uses specific color terms, the reader can ascertain the author’s thoughts on various historical events, as well as the differences between characters in the novel such as Ras, Dr. Bledsoe, and Rinehart.

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由於深受雙重文化的陶養，艾里森在美國黑白文學典範所樹立的成就及地位是毋庸置疑的。儘管毀譽參半，其文學創作著實超越了種族的藩籬，潛藏深厚的意蘊。藉由《隱形人》主人翁探尋身分的書寫，艾里森不僅微觀的牽引出非裔美人的血淚傷痕史，更宏觀的突顯出人我之間謬誤的漠視及人類面對宇宙真實和虛幻的迷惘。本文藉西方二元思維排擠異己的探究，揭櫫西方論述及權力共謀運作如何使黑人主體性、文化、及文學傳統遭受肢解及消音，並期以重新省視及建構宿遭扭曲和存而不論的黑人主體性及傳統。本論文概分五章。首章梗概艾里森之生平、理念及創作技巧，並略述各章脈絡。次章探討西方歧視性論述及霸權交相運作如何箝制剝奪黑人的主體性。第三章描述黑人尷尬的雙重身分和闕離中心的主體，並探究恢復黑人主體的可能性。第四章提出重建黑人文化、文學傳統和反制的策略試圖鬆動主流文化。末章則檢視美國黑白種族相生相剋的關係，並嚐試以艾里森提倡的多元並置無限生機的理念去摸索出美國黑白種族之間生息與共的出路。 / Deeply inculcated by double cultural heritages, Ellison's literary status and achievement are beyond question. Though both attacked and applauded, his artistic works impregnated with profundity move beyond the racial boundary. His Invisible Man both microscopically touches on the sorrowful black history and macroscopically lays bare mankind's invisibility to intersubjectivity and the obscurity between reality and appearance in the cosmos. Through the analysis of the western binary system with complicity of power and discourse which excludes the denigrated Other, this thesis aims to depict how black subjectivity and black cultural and literary tradition are dismembered and silenced. It attempts to re-see and reconstruct the distorted black subjectivity and literary tradition put in bracket. The first chapter introduces Ellison' sbiographical background, his ideas, and literary techniques. Chapter two focuses on black subject formation under the control of discourse and power. Chapter three expounds the dilemma of black double-consciousness and black decentered identity by partially borrowing the concept of differences of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Chapter four poses the problem of reconstruction of black tradition and its subversive strategies. The final chapter examines the symbiotic and intensified relationbetween blacks and whites and seeks to find a way out by Ellison's integrationist advocation of multiple possibilities.

Mad Pursuits: Therapeutic Narration in Postwar American Fiction examines three mid-century American novels—J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963)—in relation to the rise and popularization of psychoanalytic theory in America. The study historicizes these landmark novels as representing and interrogating postwar America’s confidence in the therapeutic capacity of narrative to redress psychological problems. Drawing on key concepts from narrative theory and the multidisciplinary field of narrative and identity studies, I argue that these texts develop a multi-layered, formal problematization of therapeutic narration: the narrativization of the self through modes of interpretation based on character action and development. The study, thus, investigates how the texts both critique the purported effectiveness of being healed through narrative means, as well as how they problematize their society’s investment in this method. I propose that the novels ultimately explore submerged possibilities for realizing what I call fugitive selves by creating self-representations that negotiate and exceed the confines of the paradigmatic models of plot and character of the period. In Chapter One, I argue that the ego and pop psychological movements during the postwar era encouraged the American public to define and realize psychological health, success and happiness through narrativized means. I show in Chapter Two how careful differentiation between narrative levels of interpretation in The Bell Jar reveals the novel’s complication of the self created in narrative, with and against the socio-cultural scripts and therapeutic assumptions of the period. Chapter Three concentrates on The Catcher in the Rye’s various methods of de-composing the narrative identity of the subject created through developmental and therapeutic narration. In the final chapter, I read Invisible Man as a satire of postwar psychoanalytic theory and method specifically concerning racialized narrative identities, and as a reflection on a method of enduring psychological illness. The Conclusion brings together several argumentative strands running throughout the dissertation regarding what the novels contrastively reveal about the perils, and even the possibilities, inherent in the narrativizing of the self in early postwar America.

"The Book and the Veil" is an experimental ethnographic study that presents a feminist critique of Orientalist discourse as it relates to Istanbul at the turn of the twentieth century. / The Preface reviews relevant anthropological literature in order to construct the theoretical context of the thesis. The Introduction then elaborates on the various voices embodied in the text, each of which expresses different types of cultural and critical information. / Part 1 (Chapters 1-4), comments on Grace Ellison's stay in Istanbul harems in 1914, as described in An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem. Part 2 (Chapters 5-7), engages in a dialogue with Pierre Loti as a representative of Orientalist discourse and comments on Zeyneb Hanoum's A Turkish Woman's European Impressions. Zeyneb Hanoum's experiences in Europe are then compared with Grace Ellison's stay in Turkey. / The Conclusion offers a discussion and critique of feminism and representative writing.

Thesis (M.A.)--Acadia University, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-124). Also available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

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In Rhythm Changes: Jazz Rhythm in the African American Novel, I demonstrate how novelists from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement adapted jazz rhythm into literary form. In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison famously defines invisibility as a state of being “never quite on the beat.” Ellison frames the novel as a kind of translation of the “invisible” rhythm the narrator hears in Louis Armstrong, a syncopated rhythm rooted in Black aesthetic and cultural forms. “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” Ellison was not alone in this project. The writers I study all exemplify what Duke Ellington calls a “tone parallel”—the concept that literary form could reproduce or “parallel” the particularities of musical form. However, these writers find literary strategies to transcend parallelism, such that the lines between medium begin to touch. Considering devices that cut across music and literature—anaphora, antiphonal dialogue, polysyndeton, parataxis—I argue that novelists, not just poets, respond formally to the rhythmic concepts they hear on the bandstand, synthesizing these innovations with a broader literary tradition. Rudolph Fisher’s novel The Conjure-Man Dies brings the complex rhythmic sensibility of Louis Armstrong to detective fiction; Ann Petry’s The Street channels the rhythmic phrasing of Ethel Waters in a “novel of social criticism”; Ellison’s epic unfinished second novel follows the paratactic rhythm of the preacher and jazz trombonist; and Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell projects the rhythm of Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor onto Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” By finding the literary in the musical and vice versa, these novelist-experimenters move beyond Pater’s credo that all art aspires to the condition of music.