This study is concerned with the function of the mirror metaphor in texts by three modern African-American authors. Wright's photo-text 12 Million Black Voices, Baldwin's early essays, and Ellison's novel Invisible Man go back to the time before the Civil Rights Movement when their authors envisioned social and cultural integration in the American melting pot rather than a separate literature of their own. In this context the mirror metaphor leads directly to the thematic core of each text in which issues of visibility, social recognition, the formation of self-images, and the power of stereotypes play central roles. In close readings the author shows how the mirror metaphor functions as a means to model the relationship between self and other and serves to shift the readers' attention to the complex, yet largely invisible machinery of representation.

Autorentext

The Author: Barbara Röckl studied English and German literature at the University of Konstanz and at the University of Massachussetts in Amherst (USA). Following her graduation she worked in an interdisciplinary research project on literature and anthropology which was sponsored by the German Research Foundation. Currently she teaches at the University of Kiel where she also coordinates the Center for North-American Studies.

Inhalt

Contents: Where a Mirror Ought to Be - The Desegregation of Representation in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices - Reading Anamorphoses of American Reality - James Baldwin's Early Essays - Illuminations of Black Invisibility in the Literary Theatrum Catoptricum - The Mirror Metaphor in 'Twentieth Century Fiction' and Invisible Man.