Oil & Light, Figure & Shadow: Democratic Aesthetics from Melville to Ellison

Abstract:This essay proposes a relationship between the work of Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville that cannot be captured by terms such as reference, allusion, or influence. Instead both writers are engaged in a common endeavor to reimagine what it might mean for literature to be about democracy beyond modes of representational realism. Ranging across both authors’ fictional and critical writings, I trace a series of material figures that connect Ellison and Melville and reveal a shared experimentation with non-referential modes of figuration and forms of incompletion through which both sought to produce a radically democratic aesthetics.