Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In 1955, The American Scholar published a discussion among influential writers and editors titled “What’s Wrong with the American Novel.” In the symposium Ralph Ellison remarked that “I just feel that we are called upon to do a big job, not because someone is going to give us a star on the report card, but because this is America and our task is to explore it, create it by describing it.” His conviction came from his success in communicating a creative vision for self-determination in his novel Invisible Man three years earlier. From experience, he knew that writing into a conversation about the nation’s identity could change the ways other people understood their lives and commitments. Widely read and acclaimed, the book draws together and intervenes in multiple cultural conversations. It is a virtuosic celebration of dynamism and fluidity.  When I started teaching English in a public school in 2016, just after finishing a dissertation on American literature, I was happy to see worn class sets of the novel in the book room. I have taught it most years since. I am lucky to have a choice. In New York City, as in other districts across the country, public elementary and middle schools, and some secondary schools, have given up on novels altogether in favor of canned, test-aligned English curricula with proprietary textbooks. Instead, I teach to external exams that require no knowledge of writers or books. This framework could allow for a lively, decentralized approach to literature instruction if other infrastructure supported such a thing. But with good reason, even teachers with some degree of autonomy give up on long, old novels. Excerpts are easier. Working through Invisible Man in this climate, I began to think about what it might look like to teach it as though I had learned something from Ellison about literature, and about America.  Ellison’s archives at the Library of Congress house materials from two courses that he taught during the summer of 1954, just after the Brown v Board of Education ruling. The first was at the Tuskegee Institute, his alma mater; the second was at the Salzburg Seminar, an international gathering of American faculty and European students. As is often the case with archival records, the files make it difficult to parse exactly what he said and to whom he said it. The folder on Tuskegee holds correspondence, syllabi, press releases, and his convocation speech. But lectures on literature are all in a folder labeled “Salzburg,” and most are undated. Some are scrawled on a notepad in blue ink, some on lined paper in green, some are typed. Many pages have complete paragraphs and revisions, others are lists of loosely related phrases and fragments. Even when his notes are comprehensive, there is no guarantee that he was faithful to his own scripts. Ellison had planned to use the opportunity at Tuskegee to prepare for Salzburg. Sometimes he made explicit remarks about his intended audience, but discerning which fragments were intended for which location is often difficult.  On February 23, 1954, Ellison wrote to his wife Fanny from Tuskegee. Having delivered a lecture two days prior titled “Literature and the Crisis of Negro Sensibility,” he had agreed to return in late June to teach a week-long American literature seminar and to give a convocation address. Exasperated by some of the school’s administrators, he exclaimed to her: “Here during a time when integration is in the air, they have no courses in American lit! I asked them how did they expect students to become integrated when they know nothing of the society into which they were to be integrated? It hadn’t occurred to them that literature had anything to do with it.” For Ellison, teaching an American literature survey represented an opportunity to shake students out of complacency, to help them “recognize that there was no longer any need to think of themselves as less than human.” In the same letter, Ellison also mentioned that the series at Tuskegee would “help me to prepare my Salzburg material.”  In both cases, Ellison believed that students had become acculturated to far less humane systems of government than he envisioned possible. One lecture, scrawled in green ink on lined sheets, was called “Recapitulation of Necessity for Art and Literature,” and has two dates and places along the top margin: June 22, 1954, Tuskegee, and August 23, 1954, Salzburg. Presumably, he told these two groups of students some version of the same thing: “Laws are commands on how to act and stereotypes are commands on what to be. We must obey the law, perhaps, but we must refuse for our own salvation, and for the salvation of America, to become stereotypes.” Power to break free from stultifying conformity and become most fully human could only come from bucking expectation.  His plans to teach literature during the summer of 1954 reflected his hopes for, and his awareness of the limits of, federal policy in hastening full black participation in American life. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. On May 1, in his literature course’s planning stages, he had written to a group of administrators: “If I am successful, this highly concentrated series should serve to establish some concrete awareness within the students’ minds of their relation to American literature — and thus, through grasping some of the symbolic implications of this literature, gain a consciousness of their vital involvement in those levels of the American experience that lie far deeper than the relatively shallow one of civil rights.” Policy was one avenue to opportunity. But regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision, reading and theorizing about stories could deepen students’ capacities for interpreting and reframing narratives about their lives.  One of the letter’s addressees was Morteza Sprague, Ellison’s own beloved college literature teacher, who had a major influence on his reading habits. But he had stood out to Ellison because, based on his other experiences on campus, and