Invisible Man Research Articles

The invisible man: A replication study investigating whether interpersonal goals moderate White women’s inattentional blindness to African American men

Anti-Black racism in America renders Black people both invisible and hypervisible, at times. Here, we draw on previous research on inattentional blindness, a phenomenon whereby people fail to perceive something or someone (e.g., a person walking about) in their environment when attending to another feature of their environment (e.g., other people playing a ball game). We sought to replicate past work examining the conditions under which heterosexual White women fail to perceive a Black man walking through a complex scene. Specifically, we investigated whether selective inattention to a task-irrelevant person walking through a scene of two teams passing basketballs may depend on two factors: (a) the race of the person walking through the scene (Black vs. White), and (b) the interpersonal goal of the viewer (searching for a coworker, neighbor, friend, romantic partner, or a control condition)—hence the reason we recruited heterosexual White women participants. Consistent with the original work, across three studies, we found a main effect of target race such that heterosexual White women participants were more likely to notice the White (vs. Black) man walking through the ball-passing scene. Inconsistent with the original work, we did not find that this effect was moderated by the interpersonal goal condition. We discuss the implications of the current findings and future directions.

Afrofütürizm’in Postkolonyal Çalışmalar ve Psikoanaliz Teori ile Bağlantısı

Although there have been a few scholars that have characterized Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston as writers who have contributed to the development of early forms of Afrofuturism, these studies do not approach such early Afrofuturistic works in the context of decolonization mainly due to the heavy interest given on technology and future. This article will focus on how Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Ellison’s Invisible Man can be categorized particularly as proto-Afrofuturist works because of the writers’ use of decolonized alternative spaces and technological discourse to generate alternative futures. In addition, Octavia Butler’s Kindred will be analyzed as an Afrofuturistic novel to enable readers to have a greater understanding of the context. The protagonists, their state of beings and transformations—both physical and mental—are analyzed accordingly to draw parallelism between the proto-Afrofuturistic and Afrofuturistic works. The analysis also helps to categorize the works of Hurston and Ellison as novels that have contributed to the development of Afrofuturism as a movement. More specifically, this article will focus on a discussion on the key aspects that constitute Afrofuturism including the use of settings in the novels as alternative spaces, as well as the depiction of the characters’ body and language in psychoanalytic theory in terms of alienation and decolonization of the characters within a reading of Afrofuturism.

A Study on the Chinese Translation of The Invisible Man Based on the Hermeneutic Motion Theory

A Study on the Chinese Translation of The Invisible Man Based on the Hermeneutic Motion Theory

Narrow-Band Invisibility Cloaking: The Vanishing Test Tube Revisited

Invisibility has long been a staple in science fiction. The idea of not being seen has enchanted people for centuries. Recent examples in popular literature include H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, Wonder Woman’s invisible plane, and the invisibility cloak featured in several Harry Potter books. While advances in optical cloaking have improved the likelihood of realizing invisibility, classroom demonstrations involving a vanishing object immersed in a liquid have been popular with students and teachers alike. In these demonstrations, the refractive indices of the materials and liquid are very close, and the invisibility effect is observed using white light or a broadband light source. However, since the index of refraction is a function of wavelength, any dependence of invisibility on wavelength would not be observed.

Ralph Ellison’s Macbeth

‘Whence is that knocking?/How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?’ (Macbeth, II.ii.60–1)1 ‘Why didn’t they stop that noise? […] ‘Shut up!’ I screamed, which seemed only to enrage the hidden knocker’. (Invisible Man, 318–19)2 On the morning following his pledge to join the Brotherhood, the titular protagonist of Invisible Man (1952) awakes in his Harlem boarding house to a strange knocking. An unknown person is ‘pounding the steam line’ (318) attempting to rouse the superintendent, for the building is cold. The protest is more than unsuccessful: the boiler remains off, while the racket leads ‘[t]enants up and down the entire line of apartments’ (319) to bang in retaliation. As Invisible Man, too, searches ‘for something heavy with which to strike back’ (319), he discovers a piggybank, ‘the cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro’ (319), a ‘piece of early Americana’ (319) bearing the slogan ‘FEED ME’ (321). Invisible hefts the bank and rains down blows of his own. ‘The din’, he says, ‘was deafening’ (319).

Emile Habiby and the Reinvention of the Palestinian Novel: The Pessoptimist in a Post-Realist Context

This article argues that Emile Habiby’s The Pessoptimist (1974) reinvented the Palestinian novel within a new literary genre, post-realism. Habiby’s masterpiece employs a complex, noncommittal narrative that in many ways defies, even eludes understanding, and this is its strength. In order to make the narrative more approachable, this paper attempts to contextualise the novel within a postmodern sub-genre, post-realism, making its more subtle and hidden meanings and dimensions reveal themselves. To this end, the article begins by defining realism and post-realism as literary terms and then pinpoints several key post-realist moments in this highly elusive novel. To deepen the analysis, narrative strategies employed in the novel are compared and contrasted to a similar postmodernist novel, Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Ultimately, the article contributes to developing a new sub-genre, post-realism, within the main, mother genre of postmodernism, which can not only be seen as a reinvention of the Palestinian novel, but also be used widely in literary studies.

Representation of Human Rights Violations by the Security Agents in Agyei-Agyiri’s Unexpected Joy at Dawn, Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Ellison’s Invisible Man

Purpose: Human rights violation is a universal phenomenon, a constant presence in the news and in daily lives. Such violations are occasioned by the powerful lording it over the powerless, infringing upon the victims’ unalienable rights. Human rights violations by the security agents seem to be pervasive in the recent time, resulting in the ubiquity of protests against the security agents for their wanton violations of human rights. Just recently, there were protest against police security bill in Paris, the protest against the killing of Eyad al-Hallaq by Israeli police, the protest against the jailing of Kremlin Foe of Russia, the protest against the murder of George Floyd of America and the recent EndSARS protest in Nigeria. The purpose of this study was to explore the civil and political rights in the selected novels and how such rights have been violated by the security agents.
 Methodology: The research adopted literary analysis, deploying the Marxist critical discourse which concerns itself with the struggles between classes. The reason for this choice is that literature as a major part of the superstructure is determined by the forces that make up a society’s base.
 Findings: Drawing from the selected texts and from the different reviews of literature, the research finds out, among other things, that the security agents are among the most active violators of human rights. The study also found that human rights violations are everywhere, and not an exclusive reserve of any nation, civilized or uncivilized.
 Recommendations: Giving the importance of security agents in safeguarding lives and property of citizens, the governments should include courses on human rights issues in the curriculum/training of the security agents. Different governments of the world should strengthen the aspects of fundamental human rights entrenched in their constitutions and give that hallowed section its pride of place to avoid chaos, anarchy, violent protests or even war that could result from violating the citizens’ rights. Governments should set up independent and impartial judicial bodies to adjudicate on the cases of human rights violations by the security agents. The citizens need to be sufficiently sensitized on the operative mechanisms of the security agents to make them know when they are crossing their boundaries or initiating actions capable of compelling the security agents to violate their rights. Literature should be made a compulsory subject in schools and colleges.

A Study of Symbolism in Invisible Man

A Study of Symbolism in Invisible Man

Mad scientists in H. G. Wells's early fiction

This article analyses six mad scientist characters from H. G. Wells's early fiction. The analysed mad scientists are as follows – the Bacteriologist from "The Stolen Bacillus", Hapley from "A Moth – Genus Novo", the Time Traveller from The Time Machine, Doctor Moreau from The Island of Doctor Moreau, Griffin from The Invisible Man, and Cavor from The First Men in the Moon. The article uses a broader definition of the mad scientist, one that includes not only evil scientific geniuses but also other, more benign characters, as long as they are eccentric enough to be considered mad. The said mad scientists are divided into three different categories, depending on whether they are evil, benign or neither of the two. The article shows that the analysed mad scientists reflect the early Wells's disbelief in the power of science to change the world for the better. It is also argued that Wells's varied body of mad scientists enriched and diversified the mad scientist trope in the history of the SF genre.

The inextricability of American identity dilemma in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A thematic study

The inextricability of American identity dilemma in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A thematic study

Towards Post-Institutional Individualism: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the Therapeutic Politics of Dissent

This essay explores Ralph Ellison’s engagement with social psychiatry in Invisible Man as it pertains to psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal theory of psychiatry. The novel renders traumatic experiences of psychiatric violence into a comprehensible form of political expression and dissent. Ellison’s representation of violence, particularly through electric shock, constitutes a deinstitutionalized psychiatric subject that challenges the role of institutionalized psychiatry in adjusting subjects to Fordist production through a form of deinstitutionalized individual therapy of withdrawal and self-regulation. However, this deinstitutionalized therapy would later be appropriated by mental health consumerism in a post-institutionalization era beginning in the 1970s.

Siphoning and Sabotage

AbstractIn a moment of electrified literary worldmaking, the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man steals electricity to power the 1,369 lightbulbs and radio phonography in his subterranean refuge. Narratively and materially, electricity theft diagnoses the uneven access to and impacts of electrification, while also (temporarily) creating alternative infrastructural relationships that refuse exclusion. Centered on Ellison's Invisible Man and its representation of electricity theft, this essay analyzes a constellation of US electrifictions focused on the relationship between Blackness and electricity. Going beyond a traditional literary close reading, this essay triangulates a reading of Invisible Man with a history of General Electric's “electric Slave” advertisements from the interwar period and concludes with an analysis of a 2010 WXYZ-TV Detroit news segment focused on electricity theft. GE's advertisements necessitate a reexamination of US cultural constructions of electrification as inherently progressive and instead highlight the ideologies of unfreedom and exploitation that undergird electrified modernity. While the 2010 news segment may seem of a different place and time than Ellison's novel, both are focused on moments where racialized individuals come into contact with the large-scale system of the electricity grid and the structures of power the grid both metaphorizes and materializes. Like in Invisible Man, the electricity thieves in the news segment do more than diagnose the racist impacts and exclusions of electrified modernity, they also, through their illicit acts of siphoning that redistribute electric current, materially intervene in and reimagine the larger infrastructural system.

Impact of Racism in Ralph Waldo Ellison’s novel Invisible Man

Invisible Man is a novel by Ralph Ellison published by Random House in 1952. Ellison was an American writer best known for his novel Invisible man which won the ‘National Book Award’ in 1953. This novel is a milestone in American literature which deeply discusses the social problem of racism in America. This novel is a Bildungs roman novel where the narrator (main character) begins as a bright high school student, is intelligent, and matures into a man who understands the nature of the world in the later part of his life. It is also considered to be a Universal novel as it is based on a quest to know oneself. This paper focuses on how racism impacts the narrator’s identity and his struggle to find himself in society among whites. Racism does not affect the narrator in particular but also the whole society in general at both physical and psychological levels. Existentialism is also implied in this novel as the narrator struggles to find his identity. Racism evolved in America not only after the immigration of Blacks but also after the slave era and colonial era. Black people were brought to the USA for slavery. Slave trade had happened and they suffered a lot from hunger, disease, etc. In 1865, after the civil war, Black slavery was abolished in the USA, but its legacy is going on still.

Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Acting and Race in <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> (1968)

THE STYLISTIC INVESTIGATION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN INVISIBLE MAN

Esta pesquisa apresenta a investigação estilística da construção da identidade do protagonista da obra Invisible Man. O corpus de análise constitui-se das falas de personagens da obra, analisadas a partir de sistemas linguísticos e pautadas pelo arcabouço da Linguística Sistêmico-Funcional, sistemas os quais lidam com a temática da identidade em um texto literário. Os resultados apontam recursos contrastantes, porém complementares à voz em diálogo, utilizados pelo narrador homodiegético enquanto voz narrativa.

Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II by Claire Seiler

Reviewed by: Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II by Claire Seiler Kristin Bluemel Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II. Claire Seiler. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. $90.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper); $29.99 (eBook). Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II is a fiercely intelligent, beautifully argued five-chapter monograph about relations between literature and history at the middle of the twentieth century. In it, Claire Seiler shares her discovery of copious and convincing evidence of a self-consciously midcentury period and a distinctly midcentury literature. That a midcentury period and literature have never before attracted our attention represents "the problem that the midcentury still poses for twentieth-century literary studies" (4). Modernism and its aftereffects are largely to blame for this problem—the problem of obscurity, of invisibility, of documents "partially seen and selectively analyzed" (5). The new modernist studies, for example, has led to a disciplinary "creep" that "allows the assumptions and priorities of historical or institutional modernisms to preclude inquiry into the midcentury and its literary and cultural productions" (35). Seiler invites us to join her theorization of the midcentury as midcentury in part as a response to a fixation upon the word and idea of midcentury recorded in transatlantic print documents from around the year 1950. Delighting in the form of the catalog as well as the unsuspected contents of the archive, Seiler lists instance after obscure instance of midcentury "epochal stocktaking unlike anything seen in a previous era" (13): there's The Antarctic Today: A Mid-Century Survey by the New Zealand Antarctic Society and Aeronautics at Mid-Century (both published 1952); there's the "Mid-Century Register" project of the National Council of Negro Women and The Mid-Century Challenge to American Life of the American Jewish Committee [End Page 893] (1950); there's John Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets (1950), Robert Richman's The Arts at Mid-Century (1954), and Frances Frost's collection of poems titled simply Mid-Century (1946); the Philosophical Library of New York even put out a Midcentury Reference Library with over fifty volumes treating subjects as diverse as linguistics, psychoanalysis, atomic energy, and tobacco (15–17, 19). To conceive of and read through this newfound midcentury literature (or rather, literature we now will categorize as midcentury), Seiler deploys the powerful heuristic of suspension: "the sense of being between beginnings and endings, lapsed certainties and new potentialities, recent horrors and strange, often opaque futures" (5). Suspension is as elastic as it is abstract a concept; not all suspensions are midcentury ones, of course, but in Seiler's account all midcentury literature is captured by, inhabits, and circulates suspension. Seiler's elegant, extended close readings trace the innumerable ways that suspension saturated the forms of the midcentury Anglo-American imagination, the diction, metaphors, images, rhythms, rhymes, plots, characters, and settings of its key figures' published and unpublished poetry, prose, and plays. We see it in Ralph Ellison's invisible man living an underground half-life, and again in Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, waiting, always waiting. We see it in works that feature spying (Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day [1949]) or that are influenced by strategic bombing (W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue [1947]) or sonic targeting (Frank O'Hara's memoir "Lament and Chastisement: A Travelogue of War and Personality" [1948–49]). Seiler shows us how these midcentury works "[suspend] suspense" despite their debts to wartime themes and genres associated with feelings of excitement and catharsis (147). Silences, hesitations, pauses, uncertainties, inconclusiveness, irresolution, and ambiguity proliferate in a climate of anxiety that, with publication of Auden's The Age of Anxiety, is confirmed as the dominant feeling at midcentury. Chapter one of Midcentury Suspension invites us to experiment with Seiler's new way of reading the century from the middle out rather from the beginning through with analysis of Bishop's "At the Fish Houses" in which "The water seems suspended" (57); of "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" where we encounter "the specks of...

Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature by J. Laurence Cohen

Reviewed by: Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature by J. Laurence Cohen Brian Britt J. Laurence Cohen, Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2021) Excavating Exodus presents close readings of African American primary sources, including pamphlets, poetry, and fiction, as expressions of distinct positions on racial identity. With a focus on uses of Exodus and the Moses story from the nineteenth century to the present, Excavating Exodus represents a major contribution to scholarship on African American reception of the Bible. The study moves from a discussion of Mosaic subjectivity in David Walker's pamphlet, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), Martin R. Delaney's Blake: or; The Huts of America (1859–1862), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's writings to the twentieth-century works of Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and William Melvin Kelly's A Different Drummer (1962). Contemporary readings of Exodus include works by Beyoncé and Eve Ewing's poetic rendering of Exodus in terms of Chicago politics, featuring Mayor Richard J. Daley as Pharaoh (158–161). Cohen's study articulates a set of arguments about what these sources say and how they use Exodus and Moses to say it. In dialogue with Albert Raboteau, Eddie Glaude, Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Tommie Shelby, Sharon A. Stanley, and others, Cohen advocates a view of African American solidarity that is more pragmatic than essentialist, yet "affective and political" at the same time (25). In [End Page 103] building this account, Cohen displays an impressive range of engagements with the Exodus story, across many genres and perspectives, with particular emphasis on historical and political context. One of the most valuable contributions of Cohen's study is his use of "signifying" as a mode of intertextual engagement. Like biblical reception in general, signifying applies to a wide range of interpretive practices. For instance, Cohen argues that Martin R. Delany's Blake not only represents its main character as a Moses figure, but also signifies Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) (56). Cohen similarly suggests that Frances Harper responded to David Walker's 1829 use of Moses in her 1859 essay, "Our Greatest Want." This "unmotivated signification," a concept borrowed from Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey, produces intertextual dialogue and development across the authors and texts. Yet it is not always clear how to distinguish an author's act of signification from Cohen's comparison, such as when he suggests that the character Tom Anderson in Iola Leroy (1892) signifies Stowe and Frederick Douglass alike (75–77). Cohen's sources engage multiple forms of biblical reception, ranging from direct citation of Moses and Exodus to generally Mosaic figures who bear only distant allusions and echoes of the Bible. Cohen skillfully surveys these diverse interpretive approaches, suggesting the categories of "typological rigidity" and "typological plasticity" to account for different interpretive approaches to Exodus (48). Unlike the moralistic rigidity that simply contrasted good Mosaic abolitionists against evil Pharaonic slaveholders, Cohen finds more flexible interpretive possibilities within the abolitionism of Martin R. Delaney and others who imagine a new kind of religious reality beyond slavery (60–62). But the real story of Excavating Exodus is not the how but the what of biblical exegesis. Insofar as Cohen frames Exodus interpretations "as a microcosm of the debates at the heart of the Civil Rights movement," his study contributes more to civil rights history than biblical reception history, leading to this four-part classification: "pro-Exodus desegregationism (King), anti-Exodus democratic pluralism (Ellison), pro-Exodus racial separatism (Malcolm X), and anti-Exodus radical individualism (Kelley)" (149, 153). Excavating Exodus culminates in this useful taxonomy, and it would be interesting to see even more about how these political categories relate to the rhetorical and hermeneutical strategies that produced them. Excavating Exodus bears the traces of the doctoral dissertation from which it draws, but the book's clarity and originality make an important contribution to scholarship on African American racial identity and biblical reception. For the study of American religion more generally, the book is a reminder...

Maintaining Ideology through Racial Distinction during the 1930s America in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Racial issues in 1930s America illustrate the high racial tension between Whites and African-Americans due to the series of mass racial violence. Despite the rapid industrialization, African-Americans, in this period, struggled to find their equal place in society. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man depicts the social conditions of African-American workers’ socio-economic backwardness in the 1930s. This novel is set during the post-reconstruction era of America, where Jim Crow laws were instituted. Therefore, the analysis of racial distinction in this novel is conducted using Post-Nationalist American Studies and Marxism approach. Therefore, this qualitative research utilizes Althusser’s theories: of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). The findings show how White ideology is depicted and maintained: (1) the depiction of Ideology can be seen through the class distinction and racial dependency in which African-Americans are created to be inferior and submissive to White people. Then, (2) the maintenance of ideology relies on Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses, such as religious, family, education, legal, politic, trade union, communication, and cultural institutions, function as an adjunct of the state that perpetuates and preserves White-centered values. Thus, the racially segregated society essentially only supports the needs of White capitalists as the ruling class.

An invisible man, a double agent, and a five‐tool player: Three issues for the Chief Restructuring Officer in Korean corporate reorganization procedures

AbstractThe Chief Restructuring Officer (CRO) system in Korea was introduced in 2011 after the Debtor Reorganization Act adopted the Debtor‐in‐Possession (DIP) system in 2006. However, the introduction of the CRO system in Korea, which was based on the American system, was problematic due to the lack of legal grounds, the vagueness of its legal status, and the complexity of its roles. This article explores the emerging issues related to the status and roles of a CRO in the Korean corporate‐reorganization procedure. Three major issues are analyzed: lack of legal ground and its codification (“Invisible Man”), the dual legal status of being a debtor's adviser and creditors' protector (“Double Agent”), and the expansion of the CRO's roles (“Five‐Tool Players”). This research also sketches the legal landscape of corporate reorganization practice in Korea. It provides some possible suggestions to foster the chances for debtor rehabilitation through improved operation of the CRO system.

Ralph Ellison's Acoustic Stereoscope: Reading Invisible Man through Günther Anders's Phenomenology of Music

Abstract: This article is a reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) in light of Günther Anders's phenomenology of listening (1931) and hypothesized acoustic stereoscope (1949), proposing the latter as a source for the narrator's speculative desire to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong's "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Bliue" playing simultaneously. Anders's obscure theories and notions about listening offer a way to conceptualize some of the novel's most enigmatic moments, including its descriptions of echo and its notoriously ambiguous final sentence. The article also explores Anders's career, possible social connections to Ellison, as well as Ellison's renewed interest in music in the late 1940s after years of ambivalence following his decision to stop pursuing music as a career. This recovered interest included working for inventor and sound engineer David Sarser. This part-time employment intersects with the philosophical questions and aural metaphors under investigation here, pointing to a different intellectual context for the novel's prologue and epilogue (1951) than for parts of the novel composed in the 1945–48 period.