Linked Data Explorerhttp://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1166663536
Race and the religious unconscious: Ralph Ellison's invisible theology
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- "This dissertation traces a genealogy of religious and theological antecedents to specific literary and critical instances of Ellison's understanding of race and its context in African-American history and culture. These antecedents include Luther and Shakespeare on appearance and reality, the comparative modernities of 18th-century London and the Harlem Renaissance, Ellison's friendship with theologian and critic Nathan Scott, which influenced a latent theological sensibility in Ellison and his work, Invisible Man (1952) read in conjunctions with works by Reinhold Niebuhr, Perry Miller, and Paul Tillich also published in 1952, and Ellison's civil religious correspondences with Martin Luther King, Jr. Later chapters trace residual Calvinism in Ellison's appropriations of Melville, Hawthorne, and Douglass, whose own work is haunted by neo-Calvinist interpretations of slavery as the American "original sin," and Ellison's understanding of tradition read through his appropriations of T.S. Eliot and their shared sensibilities toward "high" and "low" culture. An epilogue addresses contemporary appropriations of Ellison's religious legacy by pragmatic religious naturalists such as Jeffrey Stout and by candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential election."
- "Ralph Ellison's concept of race emerges from a number of religious and theological antecedents in the western, American, and African-American traditions upon which he builds his corpus. At the core of Ellison's literary project resides a tension between his African-American identity and experience and the broader western and American inheritances through which he must navigate such identity and experience. His understanding of race relies upon negotiations between particular and universalizing senses of identity. Significantly this same tension serves as a foundational characteristic of the concept of religion in thinkers ranging from Schleiermacher to Geertz. Thus Ellison's understanding of race is religious. It bears analogical resonance with the concept of religion. This is not to say that Ellison should be understood as a "religious" or "spiritual" writer in any classic sense; he was nothing of the sort. It is to say that as a modern, secularized novelist and critic, race offers a contextual, secular surrogate--religious, yet unconsciously so--through which Ellison's characters navigate an ambiguous modern world cut adrift from older forms of authority."
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- "Race and the religious unconscious: Ralph Ellison's invisible theology"