"Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke" focuses on the little-known
but important friendship between two canonical American writers.
The story of this fifty-year friendship, however, is more than
literary biography; Bryan Crable argues that the Burke-Ellison
relationship can be interpreted as a microcosm of the American
"racial divide." Through examination of published writings and
unpublished correspondence, he reconstructs the dialogue between
Burke and Ellison about race that shaped some of their most
important works, including Burke's "A Rhetoric of Motives" and
Ellison's "Invisible Man. "In addition, the book connects this
dialogue to changes in American discourse about race. Crable shows
that these two men were deeply connected, intellectually and
personally, but the social division between white and black
Americans produced hesitation, embarrassment, mystery, and
estrangement where Ellison and Burke might otherwise have found
unity. By using Ellison's nonfiction and Burke's rhetorical theory
to articulate a new vocabulary of race, the author concludes not
with a simplistic "healing" of the divide but with a challenge to
embrace the responsibility inherent to our social order.
American Literatures Initiative
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