In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction n recent years, the issue of canon formation has attracted a great deal of attention, a phenomenon not incidental to the influence on literary study of poststructuralism, feminism, and ethnic consciousness. At the risk of oversimplifying, we could say that these approaches mandate modes of thinking which urge distance and skepticism, modes which actively call into question the implicit assumptions of any enterprise or institution , and which actively seek to determine the presence and nature of hierarchies . Applying such modes of investigation to the realm of literature makes it hard to take for granted the great authority canons have wielded over the last century. When we look at the hielarchies in literary criticism, at the value systems those hierarchies encode, at the people and institutions they empower, and at the "others" they marginalize, it becomes difficult to view texts as reflecting (or failing to reflect) absolute value from an absolute source. Even the field from which the canonized texts emerge cannot be seen as a totality, either in potential or in fact. Rather, that field exists already in a privileged position created by a series of prior cuts and hierarchies. Since these prior cuts, moreover, determine at very basic levels the power to speak, to be heard, and to be understood, they in fact control not only what constitutes a canon but also what may affect it. The obvious problem, then, is not that there are no channels for change but that those channels become dysfunctional when they themselves need alteration. To put it another waya way that parallels the situation of Ralph Ellison's protagonist-how can one be an effective spokesman for change, when speaking effectively means conforming to the very set of rules one wants to change? As that protagonist discovers, this problem exists whether speech means speaking at a ceremonial dinner of "white citizens" or before a northern "trustee," in the office of a black "educational leader" or a white "businessman," at a public "political" rally or a private "committee" meeting. As any structuralist would point out, the speech cannot have meaning independent of a complicated system of social, psychological, and linguistic hierarchies. As any poststructuralist would further note, those hierarchies reflect an arbitrary and tenuous center, thoroughly and always dependent on an already present but unacknowledged XII Introduction other whose crucial presence can only be perceived as absence, as its own invisibility. The problem, then, of speaking from invisibility, of making the absence visible, pertains not only to public functions but to speech itself, to that act, always both autobiographical and fictional, of describing one's world. Ellison demonstrates this memorably when his invisible and nameless narrator speaks to an invisible and nameless audience, attempting to uncover in their shared otherness the voice which had been encoded into silence, excised from the canon. A first and central claim of my book, therefore, is that Invisible Man is deeply framed and informed by the issue of "canonicity," of how to speak from invisibility, of how to speak to and through tradition without sacrificing the speaker's voice or denying the tradition it attempts to engage. I argue that this engagement with tradition is necessitated by a complicated interaction of historical and critical events which effected the erasure of the black's role in crucial parts of American history and of literary history. Taking a radical approach to the use of allusion, I show that it is one device Ellison employs consistently and effectively to engage the issue of canonicity. To make this case, I examine in detail the ways an allusion can destabilize traditional presumptions. I scrutinize tentative implications a reader draws from the suspicion that something in a text alludes to another text, especially as they impel hypothesizing about the "alluded-to" text. Because allusions require reinterpreting tradition in light of the new work, their effect on the reader's understanding is similar to the effect of reading a piece of literary criticism. In regard to the alluded-to work, allusions do on a semiconscious level what criticism does on a conscious level and what literature does on an unconscious level: alter our sense of tradition. A systematic use of allusions, which exploits their literary-critical potential, can indeed create a coherent subtext of literary criticism. The subtext Ellison creates, I argue, is one which engages the issues of marginality and decentering , of ethno- and logocentrism, of encoding and interpretation in ways which anticipate much contemporary European theory and much American rehistoricizing in regard...

Share