Search

The paper dwells on Ralph Ellison’s biography and his works, especially on his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952), its topical issues, poetics, the phenomenon of its exceptional success and the way it influenced over to Ellison’s status as one of the biggest XXth century classics and a reputed contributor to the African American and American literary canon. The essay traces the publication history of Ellison’s works, including posthumously released editions of his unpublished texts in 1990s-2010s, that became a result of an extensive research made by Ellison’s literary executor, literary historian, editor, textual critic John F. Callahan. The survey of American and European Ellison studies characterizes the basic corpus of books, academic papers, critical essays, collections, etc., both of the earlier (before mid-nineties) an contemporary period; the most outstanding scholars in the field are mentioned. Finally the essay gives a brief outlook of the scanty Soviet / Russian Ellisoniana – translations and editions, critical response and studies, and stresses an obvious discrepancy between the situation in the West and in Russia, where the Invisible Man still remains untranslated and the amount of scholarly papers, devoted to Ellison, scarcely reaches a dozen.

The paper makes a survey of the life and works by Phillis Wheatley (1753?- 1784), the first African American female poet, analyses critical reception of her poetry during her lifetime and up to nowadays, shows the way her literary reputation has been changing (sometimes drastically) as a result of the changing bias and attitudes in the course of the development of African American literary studies since 1960s till 2010s.The paper also attempts to assess Phillis Wheatley’s role in American literary and cultural history.

Despite its decidedly humanist angle, Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) also positions itself in a no-man’s land, not simply because it is seen through the eyes of a woman but because it occupies a space where the compelling narration by the fictitious character of Sister Mary and the equally compelling photographs by DeCarava still rest uneasily—literally and at times photographically—within the wider landscape of Harlem. As such, this collaborative photo-text on the daily life of Harlem is a much more subtle and complex project than it first appears. Even though the project was enabled by Hughes’s reputation as a prominent writer of African American life, the actual approach allows for something ‘subversive’ to take place in the interaction between the text and the photographs accompanying it. This examination looks at how The Sweet Flypaper of Life—vastly underrated in studies of American photography—pushed beyond previous photographic studies of Harlem and as such, beyond the boundaries set by photo-textual collaborations in general.