"Battle Royal" and the effects of Greed on Personal Values

In the past decade, queer theory has sparked a renewed interest in the flagging field of high theory, driven largely by the poststructuralist projects of Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, and Eve Sedgwick. Such dense, yet ethereal, theorizing has often attracted negative attention for its failure, in Nancy Fraser's words, to "overcome or at least ameliorate the asymmetries in current practices of subjectivation" or to "construct practices, institutions, and forms of life in which the empowerment of some does not entail the disempowerment of others" (68). Butler, for her part, has nevertheless recently argued that "theoretical wisdom must have a certain measure of autonomy from practical wisdom" if it is to thrive (266). It seems to me that both these views are correct, in their own ways, and that Barbara Christian's influential essay "The Race for Theory" continues to suggest a way of negotiating the space between them. In that essay, Christian makes the case that theory takes place in literary texts in ways that are just as interesting and sophisticated as what theoretical writing per se has to offer and that an over-reliance on the highly specialized language of poststructuralism, divorced from life experience, tends to buttress a hierarchy of white privilege. Taking to heart Christian's plea that we look to literature by people of color as much as we do to Ivory Tower philosophizing for theoretical insight, this essay explores the engagement that Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man makes with the sorts of theoretical concerns that have preoccupied much queer theory: questions of political speech and agency, of gender's articulation with and against sexuality, and of the cultural crosshatching of sexuality with other axes of identification, notably race. I argue that in Ellison's novel the narrator eventually confronts phallocentric representational strategies as illusions of masculine agency, since he continually fails to acquire the sorts of instrumentalities of power associated with directly political forms of speech that are articulated in phallic terms. Indeed, the novel's frequent recourse to castration imagery ultimately typifies its abandonment of the heteronormative phallus' usual association with privileged social agency. In the face of a male-dominated post-war intellectual scene given over to liberal humanist voluntarism, Ellison's novel poses troubling questions that queer theory has recently explored further in its critiques of agency and the phallus. The following discussion will argue that Ellison's novel offers a remarkable-but remarkably overlooked-rejection of the phallus' usual presumption of authority and agency.

Katharina Motyl. "Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952)." Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Ed. Timo Müller. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017. 278-293.

In Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, the nameless African American protagonist , who has sought refuge from white supremacist society in a basement, narrates his life story and the insights he has had in self-imposed exile. Throughout the story, in which he symbolically lives through African American history after emancipation from slavery, Invisible Man struggles to find his identity, as he is socially invisible to the white majority society and other characters fail to perceive his individuality. Rejecting various political ideologies with which he was at one point affiliated, especially communism and black accommodationism, Invisible Man finds his identity by narrating the multiple subject positions he occupies to the reader, hoping that the reader will afford him the recognition he is denied in the story world. The novel is written in a modernist style that draws on black expressive culture such as jazz and the blues.

The Tears of a Clown questions the pervasive narrative that men have begun only recently to realize the limitations society places on them as men. Feminist scholars of masculinity contend men now are starting to see masculinity as an unattainable ideal that restricts, oppresses, and frustrates them. This questionable claim functions as a rhetorical move to create simultaneously a space for male voices in feminist discourse and to validate masculinity studies as a field of inquiry, which seemingly needs no legitimization when one considers the popularity of gender studies in the academy and the value such work can bring to our understanding of politics, history, culture, and society. My study uses an analysis of comic texts to glean information about the fluctuating ideological script of postwar American masculinities. My contention is that the comic—comedy, humor, and laughter—functions as a viable way for men to redirect and sublimate the fear, anxiety, and anger they experience as men. Since many associate this strategy for dealing with emotion as “kidding around,” few people, even within the academy, take humor and laughter seriously. Therefore, it does not betray masculinity’s requirement that men remain stoic and instead serves a vital social function. By close reading comic texts, I reveal the diverse ways male protagonists employ this strategy, and in the process, I reveal the importance of the comic in understanding the relationship between the male subject and society.

African American Review, 2011

Honorable mention, Darwin T. Turner Award for best essay in AAR, 2011. “In what follows I argue that the novels and essays of Ralph Ellison engage fruitfully and almost incessantly with such resonant tensions between the sacred and the profane, and that jazz serves, on the strength of those tensions, as the exemplary model for Ellison’s ambitious democratic vision.”

2003

Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Mati delineates the experience of the Invisible Man's growing consciousness of vanishing state through a series of dehumanizing and cruel trials at the hands of an overtly racist white patriarchy. Ellison's displays how the protagonist's moments of consciousness occur through his recognition ofwomen, black and white, similar impotent positions. Although the Invisible Man can make sense of his own feminized oppression at the hands of white men, the women are erased. The women function as a device or background upon which the narrator and other black men can unfurl their psychic and emotional scars. Ultimately, Ellison replicates the very invisibility that he desire to critique in his novel since he evades the full exploration of the political sections ofrace and gender. Ellison produces flat, generic representations of women that ultimately function to erase the complicated and obviously differently socialized experiences of black and white women.

Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, 2014

Themes of fear and loathing are often associated with the narrative trajectory of the twentieth century American Bildungsroman. In the traditional European prototype, coming-of-age is charted through the representation of ordeals and life lessons which the young protagonist or Bildungsheld must overcome in order to achieve their harmonious course of maturation. The American model forgoes this necessity of harmony. Ralph Ellison’s 'Invisible Man' (1952) is one such coming-of-age narrative, following the pedagogical and experiential education of an African American adolescent in the 1920s and 30s. By innovating upon several of the traditional Bildungsroman subgenres: the Künstlerroman (development of the artist novel), and Erziehungsroman (novel of pedagogical e ducation), Ellison subverts the inefficiencies of representing race in American literature and culture that had come before him. At the same time, the author illuminates the hypocrisies of racial and ideological identity politics in a segregated society.

Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN does not at all mirror his troubled, early association with the Communist Party. Rather it is a satirical response to it.