Cain, William. “Darkness Visible: Ralph Ellison’s Life and Work.” Society 45.4 (2008): 376-81. Web.

This article placed Ralph Ellison as having a sort of writer’s block in finishing his second novel. The novel was highly anticipated after his success in Invisible Man but with the pressures and the results of fame, this article argues that becoming closer to white artists and highly known white figures, he lost his touch and could not finish his novel.

Lamm, Kimberly. “Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ and Romare Bearden’s Photomontages.” Callaloo, vol. 26, no. 3, 2003, pp. 813–835. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3300728.

This article is rich in content and really uses specific readings to construct the ideas behind Invisible man and how representation was used to visually construct blackness. Lamm goes over some of the main parts I would like to discuss and the art forms that have been reconstructed in galleries.

Kuryla, P. Soc (2013) 50: 10. https://doi-org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/10.1007/s12115-012-9612-2

This article emphasizes the argument of not finishing Ellison’s highly anticipated second novel. Many factors were contributed even a speculation of disintegrity and blaming of a fire that wasn’t as crucial when first asked about it. Ellison sometime after his success in Invisible Man was labeled as a “protester” and people were expecting his writing to reflect this protesting and continuing the fight for equality.  Very interestingly enough, his invisibility was now associated with only one type of visibility. Ellison was an artist, not only an activist or a musician. He had many interests beyond literacy and he enphasised being

Millichap, Joseph. “Fiction, Photography, and the Cultural Construction of Racial Identity in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’” South Atlantic Review, vol. 76, no. 4, 2011, pp. 129–142. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43738922.

This article is helpful because of the information on Ralph Ellison’s personal life as well as his interest in photograph. Millichap links Ellison’s personal interests in photography and argues that that is what this book is, photographs. By doing close readings and using different articles, Millichap shows what pictures Ellison used to explain his life and the road to consciousness.

Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: a Biography. Vintage Books, 2007.

This is a biography on Ralph Ellison and reinforces his interests in art. It goes over many of his influences . This book also gives a new perspective on the invisible man’s grandfather. His grandfather is a sort of haunting/ghost like figure and although for the story to develop and for IM to gain consciousness his grandfather is needed and sets the tone of the book, it can also be seen as a reminder of Ralph Ellison the author not producing a second book, & can also be seen as his personal struggle in wanting to perfect and make art through literature.

Rowell, Charles H., and Kerry James Marshall. “An Interview with Kerry James Marshall.” Callaloo, vol. 21, no. 1, 1998, pp. 263–272. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3300033.

Along with the article by Walling, the theme of civil protest and including a representation of blackness is a subtle artistic way is important to Marshall as he says in his interview. Having this interview and his explanations as to why he used so much black and what is the meaning to your reaction gives a new meaning to invisible man and the art it creates.

Sargent, Antwaun. “’Invisible Man’ Inspires Conceptual Art About Blackness.” Vice, VICE, 21 June 2017, www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev4wwm/invisible-man-inspires-conceptual-art-blackness.

This article really ties Invisible Man and its impact on today’s society and generation since it was published in 2017 about a Gallery. Using everyday items you find out while out in public such as transit seats to show invisibility and blackness. Martos uses Invisible Man’s feelings of being there but others choosing not to see them. This article also is a link to Rankine’s Citizen which also is a modern book on blackness and experiences.

“Silence Is Golden.” The Studio Museum in Harlem, 4 Jan. 2019, studiomuseum.org/collection-item/silence-golden.

Since my focus is on art, this painting gives a better understanding of the interview with Kerry James Marshall and what his intentions were in recreating Invisible Man.

Walling, William. “‘Art’ and ‘Protest’: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man Twenty Years After.” Phylon (1960-), vol. 34, no. 2, 1973, pp. 120–134. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/273820.

This article establishes protesting as a form of art and expression. Specifically Walling uses Invisible Man and Ralph Ellison’s vision of art and ties it with passive resistance. He gives us a reason for the civil art form of protesting and explains why in order to not only be successful but keep the fight going its important to form this type of protest. Walling also gives us unique details and visions and beliefs of Ellison. Besides art specifically, Walling talks about musical art forms such as jazz and blues which is also a major part in Invisible Man.

Connolly, Paula T. “Cultured Toys.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 21 no. 1, 1997, pp. 148-151. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/uni.1997.0003

Lois Rostow Kuznets explores the depiction of toys in literature, but also the representation and function of toys as cultural artifacts. She also discusses how their uses have ranged from fetish and sacred object to a way of socializing children. Kuznet also argues that collecting dolls both signals a struggle between adults and children for the meaning and possession of toys and how it cites, for adults, a reaction against the development of technology.  

Bergner, Gwen. “Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem.” American Quarterly, vol. 61 no. 2, 2009, pp. 299-332. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/aq.0.0070

In Gwen Bergner’s piece she draws most of her info from the Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court case. Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark found evidence that segregation damaged black children’s self-esteem and hampered their ability to learn. Clark and his wife Mamie had tested black children’s “racial preference” by asking them to choose between black dolls and white dolls, interpreting the choice of white dolls as evidence of damaged self-esteem. She also argues against the doll test results that dolls do not have any correlations to self-esteem but argues that black children’s white preference behavior is signifying a form of psychic hybridity or mixed-race identification that eludes our historic

black/white binary.

Roye, Susmita. “Toni Morrison’s Disrupted Girls and Their Disturbed Girlhoods: The Bluest Eye and A Mercy.” Callaloo, vol. 35 no. 1, 2012, pp. 212-227. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cal.2012.0013

Susmita Roye states that Morrison emphasizes that the most imperceptible members of an already invisible black society in a race-segregated world are the little black girls, that are shrunk in stature by the crushingly diminishing combination of their skin color, gender,and age.  In Roye’s article she draws from both The Bluest Eye and  A Mercy which  reflect Morrison’s continued concern for “girls interrupted.” Both novels present a number of ways in which girlhoods are aborted.  By juxtaposing the first and the latest of her novels, Roye argues that Morrison’s feminist ideology accommodates universal girlhood, crossing frontiers of race, class, culture, ethnicity, continents, and centuries.

Frever, Trinna S. “‘Oh! You Beautiful Doll!”: Icon, Image, and Culture in Works by Alvarez, Cisneros, and Morrison.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 28, no. 1, 2009, pp. 121–139. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40783477.

Trinna S. Frever argues that dolls are multifaceted symbol for societal disputes over what it is to be female and contests of cultural and national identity. Frever uses three different depictions of dollhood in this essay which are, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Sandra Cisneros’s “Barbie-Q,” and the doll dismemberment scene from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. In this essay it is concluded that dolls are more than just a toy but are icons in contemporary society, part of the value system of the U.S.-dominant culture, and its “representation” of womanhood.

Bernstein, Robin. “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 160–169. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41414088.

Robin Bernstein argues that playing with dolls and reading children books has a direct correlation to race. He mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin  and a little girl Burnett, who took what she read in the book and acted out scenes she felt were most powerful. “At other times, Burnett performed the scene of Eva s death, casting the white doll as Eva and as “all the weeping slaves at once.” And at least once she designated the doll Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree. For this  scenario, the girl bound the doll to a candelabra stand. “with insensate rage,” she whipped her doll. Throughout whipping, the doll maintained a “cheerfully hideous” grin, suggested to the girl that Uncle Tom was “enjoying the situation” being “brutally lashed.” In the article it is seen that many nineteenth-century white children read books about slavery and then used dolls to act out scenes of racialized violence and forced labor. It is also argued that representational play is performative in that it produces culture. Then the article goes on to argue about animate vs sentient dolls and the question of “what is a person?”

Yancy, George. “A Foucauldian (Genealogical) Reading of Whiteness.” Radical Philosophy Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–29., doi:10.5840/radphilrev200141/217.

This piece touches on the deformities that the characters in the novel The Bluest Eye develop when brought up with the idea of “whiteness” and what it means to be white. The author brings up the idea that whiteness in fact has evolved into the universal code of beauty especially in America, which I believe will be extremely useful in my paper as I delve into how the color of our skin affects who a person is while rewriting history at the same time.

Burcar, Lilijana. “Imploding the Racialized and Patriarchal Beauty Myth through the Critical Lens of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Vestnik Za Tuje Jezike 9.1 (2017): 139-158. Web.

This second article illuminates Americas unconvential beauty standard and how from a young age these little girls begin to internally hate their bodies and themselves due to not being able to achieve these impossible standards. This article made me realize how for my paper I need to incorporate both The Bluest Eye and The Invisible Man in order to really follow through with a substantial analysis.

Booth, W. James. “The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison.” Political Theory, vol. 36, no. 5, 1 Oct. 2008, pp. 683–707.

This journal discusses the idea of race as a color as well as an identity which is rather evident because at times our society makes it to be that race is all that can define us. This article makes a note on the fact that memory and social justice also tie a factor into the larger color of whiteness as well as it masquerades the wrongs it has achieved.

Bump, Jerome. “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism.” College Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2010, pp. 147–170., doi:10.1353/lit.0.0108.

This article discusses the use of racism in this novel and how it evokes a sense of anger and emotion into the main characters and readers, as well as how the age is a major factor of how the characters can react to how they are cheated as it is even mention how Pecola is aware she is being wronged at times but cannot comprehend the extent of it.

Works Cited

DuCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1993.

• This book compares the patterns of white and African American writers. It draws an historical account of the black literary tradition, focusing mostly on black female writers, in order to examine their use of tropes, such as the marriage plot, popularized by white authors, and how they rejected and reworked such tropes to the end of reclaiming their sexuality. It further sketches out cultural attitudes towards non-traditional relationships throughout history.

Malmgren, Carl D. “Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 173, Gale, 2003. Literature Criticism Online, http://link.galegroup.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/QKPMSE517876176/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=04d83dce. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019. Originally published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 41, no. 3, Spring 2000, pp. 251-262.

• This article looks at how Morrison uses a variety of diverse voices and perspectives in The Bluest Eye. From a much more technical perspective than many of the other sources, it analyzes the text to determine Morrison’s intent in using her many different techniques.

Moses, Cat. “The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999, pp. 623–637. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2901343.

• This article looks at the ways in which The Bluest Eye acts as a piece of music. In the course of doing so, it analyzes the characters of the three prostitutes, coming to find that they represent reclaimance of female sexuality as opposed to victimhood, as many others  argue.

Pal, Payel and Neelakantan, Gurumurthy. “Morrison’s Prostitutes in The Bluest Eye.” Notes on Contemporary Literature. Volume 44. Pages 4-7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261527825_Morrison’s_Prostitutes_in_The_Bluest_Eye

• This article analyzes the role of the characters of China, Poland and Miss Marie in The Bluest Eye, looking at the facets of life these women give us insight into that no other characters are able to show us. It argues that in many ways they better adhered to society’s standards than many of the other characters.

Rickard, Wendy, and Merl Storr. “Editorial: Sex Work Reassessed.” Feminist Review, no. 67, 2001, pp. 1–4. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1395526.

• This article explores efforts to shift negative attitudes towards sex workers by giving insight into the hugely diverse life experiences sex workers go through. It provides anecdotal evidence of how sex workers are regarded and gives a modern account of social attitudes, likely most directly applicable to the time right after Morrison would have been writing The Bluest Eye.

Saleem, Taqwaa Falaq, “The Village Mother in Selected Works of Toni Morrison” (2010). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 180. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/180

• This article examines the “surrogate mother” characters in Morrison’s novels. In looking at China, Poland and Miss Marie in The Bluest Eye, the author concludes that they are the most prominent motherly figures in Pecola’s life, and looks at the implications of this evaluation.

Scott, Lynn. “Beauty, Virtue and Disciplinary Power: A Foucauldian Reading of Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 173, Gale, 2003. Literature Criticism Online, http://link.galegroup.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/SNXFMQ391694420/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=65607942. Accessed 5 May 2019. Originally published in Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 24, 1996, pp. 9-23.

• This article looks at the historical and cultural context surrounding The Bluest Eye to better examine the power structures at play. Although it does not contain an analysis of Morrison’s prostitutes, its historical discourse and analytical method are both very informative.

Putnam, Amanda. “Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and A Mercy.” Black Women, Gender Families, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 25–43. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.5.2.0025.

Black Women, Gender & Families analyzes, Black Women’s Studies paradigms. It centers the study of Black women and gender within the critical discourses of history. It also has an article specifically about Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Grogan, Christine. “Morrison Responds to the Psychological Community in The Bluest Eye.”  Father-Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Complex Trauma  of the Wound and the Voiceless. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016. 75-94. EBSCOhost,  search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2016383186&site=ehost-liVe.

This work traces the development of father–daughter incest narratives in the Bluest Eye and Ellison’s Invisible Man. This work explores what Toni Morrison has called the “most delicate,” “most vulnerable” member of society: a female child; and, what happens when the trauma is not just a one event but numerous experiences. Some traumatic experiences, namely father–daughter incest, are culturally reduced to the untellable, and yet accounts of paternal incest are readily available in literature.

PIPES, CANDICE. “Failed Mothers and the Black Girl-Child Victim of Incestuous Rape in The Bluest Eye and Push.” Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood, edited by Lee Baxter and Martha Satz, Demeter Press, Bradford, ON, 2017, pp. 183–200. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1rfzz5n.14.

This work explores a lot of Toni Morrison’s novel and examines the ways in which Morrison’s work deviates from western culture’s ideological norms of mothers, motherhood, and mothering. Pecola’s mother plays a big part in Pecola’s life and how she became who she was at the end of the book so this work which shows how Morrison challenges the concept that mothering, and motherhood will help when writing my essay. This work looks at Morrison’s work through an array of interdisciplinary approaches.

Zender, Karl F. “Faulkner and the Politics of Incest.” American Literature, vol. 70, no. 4, 1998, 739–765. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2902390.

This work examines Faulkner’s depiction of incest, finding it to be religious and oedipal. It is said that both Morrison and Ellison were influenced by Faulkner, this could therefore be used to analyze Morrison and Ellison.