Ralph Ellison and His Influence(s)
Ralph Ellison is a pivotal figure in American letters. His fiction—most notably his 1952 novel Invisible Man—draws inspiration from an encyclopedic list of sources, from Benjamin Franklin’s 1791 autobiography to Norbert Weiner’s 1950 treatise on cybernetics. His oeuvre, in turn, continues to influence creatives like Percival Everett, Spike Lee, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead, whose imagined worlds contain distinctly Ellisonian elements. In this course, we will explore Ellison’s fiction, criticism, and photography in this expanded context and learn why Ellison is, in the words of Timothy Parrish, “arguably the most important black intellectual after [W. E. B.] Du Bois,” and “the essential figure of twentieth-century American letters.”