Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison
- Editor: Tracy Floreani
- Pages: 208
- Published: 2024
- ISBN: 9781603296724 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603296717 (Hardcover)
One of the most important American authors and public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Ralph Ellison had a keen and unsentimental understanding of the relationship between race, art, and activism in American life. He contended with other writers of his day in his examination of the entrenched racism in society, and his writing continues to inform national conversations in letters and culture.
The essays in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison will help instructors in colleges, high schools, and prisons teach not only the indispensable Invisible Man but also Ellison’s short stories, his essays, and the two editions of his second, unfinished novel, Juneteenth and Three Days before the Shooting . . . . In considering Ellison’s works in relation to jazz, technology, humor, politics, queerness, and disability, this volume mirrors the breadth of Ellison’s own life, which extended from the Jim Crow era through the Black Power movement.
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Primary Sources (3)
Biographical Materials (4)
Contextual Materials (5)
Critical Studies (6)
Other Resources (9)
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Introduction (15)
Invisible Man in the Twenty-First Century
Layers of Identity: Learning to Teach Invisible Man (26)
Resisting Black-Lack Readings of Invisible Man (35)
Can the Joke “Slip the Yoke”? Invisible Man and the Knot of Black Humor (45)
“Punking” Invisible Man: Reading Race, Queerness, and Disability (53)
Invisible Man and the Urban Uprising (67)
Claiming the Lens of Love: Reading Invisible Man through 1 Corinthians 13 (76)
Broader Contexts
Historicizing Ellison: Politics and Pedagogy (88)
The Democratic Ideal of Ellison’s Jazz-Shaped America (97)
Listening for the Invisible (106)
Short Works
The Voices of History: Narrating the Past in Ellison’s Short Fiction (112)
Teaching Intergenerational Conflict and Technology in “Flying Home” and “Cadillac Flambé” (122)
Is Resistance Futile? Exploring “King of the Bingo Game” in a Secondary ELA Classroom (133)
Navigating Freedom with “Uncertainty and Daring”: Reading Ellison and Writing Memoir in a Prison Classroom (142)
Epistolary Ellison: Letter Writing as Pedagogy (153)
Versions of the Second Novel
Reflecting on the Mysteries of Ellison’s “Unfinished” Project (162)
An Episodic Writing-as-Inquiry Approach to Three Days before the Shooting . . . (173)
Notes on Contributors (183)
Survey Participants (187)
Works Cited (189)
