Description
Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist examines Ralph Ellison's body of work as an extended and ever-evolving expression of the author's philosophy of temporalitya philosophy synthesized from the writings of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche that anticipates the work of Gilles Deleuze. Germana presents Ellison's theory of temporality and social change as going up against all forms of linear causality and historical determinisma theory that views time as a multiplicity of dynamic processes, rather than a static container for the events of our lives. Integral to this theory is Ellison's observation that the social, cultural, and legal processes constitutive of racial formation are embedded in static temporalities reiterated by historians and sociologists. In other words, Ellison's critique of US racial history is, fundamentally, a matter of time. This book shows how Ellison's fiction, criticism, and photography reclaims technologies through which static time and linear history are formalizedin effect, revealing intensities implicit in the present that, if actualized, could help us "act un-historically." The result is a reinterpretation of Ellison's oeuvre, as well as an extension of Ellison's ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future. Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist reveals the chaos of possibility lurking beneath the patterns of living we mistake for enduring certainties.
About the Author
Michael Germana is Associate Professor at West Virginia University.
Reviews
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice *
Michael Germana's Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist argues for a new understanding of Ellison's sense of time. Really, it argues for a new sense of Ellison, one that overturns a good many established critical positions. This is a learned book, at times a difficult book. But it is never cold; it retains a sense of soul, inspired perhaps by the fact that Germana is not simply a literary critic but also a jazz drummer. That rhythmic sensibility is apparent in the book's structure, the shape of its arguments, even the sequence of its sentences. What emerges is a new conception of one of the 20th century's leading author-intellectuals, one that accounts for the totality of Ellison's literary production. * Adam Bradley, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Ralph Ellison in Progress *
Ralph Ellison: Temporal Technologist is a finely nuanced, theoretically informed reading of Ellison's sense of time and historical subjectivity. Exploring an array of visual and sonic paradigms, Michael Germana brilliantly exposes the fecundity of stylistic and thematic tools with which Ellison refigured the racialized historical subject whose specter haunts the notion of American nationhood. This is the finest and most important work on Ellison to date. * Alan Nadel, University of Kentucky, author of Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon *
After the death of Ralph Ellison in 1994 there has been a gradual and necessary reassessment of his achievement, accelerated by the publication of his long-awaited second novel Three Days Before the Shooting. Despite the fame he achieved as the author of Invisible Man, Ellison's complexity and significance as an artist and a thinker remains largely undescribed. Michael Germana's Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist provides a major re-evaluation of Ellison's accomplishments, and is the essential starting point for the new Ellison studies. * Timothy Parrish, Virginia Tech *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190682088
Author Michael Germana
Format Hardback
Page Count 264
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 567g
Dimensions(mm) 157mm * 236mm * 28mm
About the Author
Michael Germana is Associate Professor at West Virginia University.
Reviews
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice *
Michael Germana's Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist argues for a new understanding of Ellison's sense of time. Really, it argues for a new sense of Ellison, one that overturns a good many established critical positions. This is a learned book, at times a difficult book. But it is never cold; it retains a sense of soul, inspired perhaps by the fact that Germana is not simply a literary critic but also a jazz drummer. That rhythmic sensibility is apparent in the book's structure, the shape of its arguments, even the sequence of its sentences. What emerges is a new conception of one of the 20th century's leading author-intellectuals, one that accounts for the totality of Ellison's literary production. * Adam Bradley, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Ralph Ellison in Progress *
Ralph Ellison: Temporal Technologist is a finely nuanced, theoretically informed reading of Ellison's sense of time and historical subjectivity. Exploring an array of visual and sonic paradigms, Michael Germana brilliantly exposes the fecundity of stylistic and thematic tools with which Ellison refigured the racialized historical subject whose specter haunts the notion of American nationhood. This is the finest and most important work on Ellison to date. * Alan Nadel, University of Kentucky, author of Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon *
After the death of Ralph Ellison in 1994 there has been a gradual and necessary reassessment of his achievement, accelerated by the publication of his long-awaited second novel Three Days Before the Shooting. Despite the fame he achieved as the author of Invisible Man, Ellison's complexity and significance as an artist and a thinker remains largely undescribed. Michael Germana's Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist provides a major re-evaluation of Ellison's accomplishments, and is the essential starting point for the new Ellison studies. * Timothy Parrish, Virginia Tech *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190682088
Author Michael Germana
Format Hardback
Page Count 264
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 567g
Dimensions(mm) 157mm * 236mm * 28mm
