Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist

"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, University of California, Davis and author of Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America