ABSTRACT
The centrepiece to NADEL’s fascinating study is the proposition that Invisible Man is “deeply framed and informed by the issue of ‘canonicity’, of how to speak to and through tradition without sacrificing the speaker’s voice or denying the tradition it attempts to engage”. Nadel argues convincingly that Ellison explores the institutionalization and suppression of voices through a radical use of literary allusion. In a critique that sustains a fruitful balance between close, textual scrutiny and large-scale cultural and theoretical concerns, Nadel investigates Ellison’s intertextual references to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Lewis Mumford, in relation to contemporary critical debates surrounding ethnocentrism and logocentrism, and marginality and decentring.
