The critic and the little man: On African -American literary studies in the post -Civil Rights era

This dissertation explores the emergence of the little man as a key figure in African American literary studies in the post-Civil Rights era. Alongside readings of the appearance of the little man in several literary and critical works by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, I trace the ways in which the figure has been taken up as an allegory for the critic in the often contentious debates concerning race and the reconfiguration of American literary history over the last three decades. I demonstrate how in his celebrated 1978 essay, "The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience," Ellison argues against the tendency to interpret American literature and culture in a racially-enclosed field. Instead, Ellison presents the enigmatic figure of the little man as a "connoisseur, critic, trickster" whose familiarity with both black and white aesthetic traditions allows for a subtle understanding of the ways in which what he calls "the diverse elements of our various backgrounds, our heterogeneous pasts, have indeed come together, 'melted,' and undergone metamorphosis." With particular attention to the criticism of Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Kenneth Warren, and Ross Posnock, I argue that the essay has frequently been misunderstood by critics as either a validation of a self-contained tradition of African American literature or as advocating a universalizing, deracialized vision of American literary history. I offer an alternative interpretation of Ellison's essay as a form of "symbolic action" that schools his readers in the knowledge of two of his most important mentors: the literary philosopher, Kenneth Burke, and Hazel Harrison, his music teacher at the Tuskegee Institute in the 1930's. Building on the insights of Hortense Spillers, I argue that the critic's identification with "little manhood" demands a disidentification with the masculinist ideologies of white supremacy in Jim Crow America, and opens the figure up to black feminist and queer reading strategies. By exploring the myriad literary and theoretical sources of the little man in black vernacular culture, Freudian psychoanalysis, and in D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, I argue that the figure undoes the hierarchal oppositions of male/female and black/white and thus disrupts and reconfigures socially-determined literary categories and readerly subject-positions. Through readings of the appearance of the little man in Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, and in Baldwin's "children's book for adults," Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood, I conclude that the figure is surprisingly well-suited for the literary articulation of post-oedipal configurations of race, sexuality, and kinship in the post-Civil Rights era.