Minority literature discussed at meeting
The importance of minority groups in American literature lies in "each group's telling it as it is and thrashing it out with others to determine who we are as a people," a noted black novelist told more than 600 high school and college English instructors Friday in the Kansas Union.
Ralph Ellison, author of "Invisible Man" (1952), addressed the English department's 17th annual conference on Composition and Literature in High School and College, entitled "Minority Voices in American Fiction: Authors and Themes."
Minority group literature has been a part of American life since colonial days, Ellison explained, when "so many people with diverse cultural backgrounds came together on this continent." This was largely evidenced in folklore, he added.
Distinctively Negro literature arose when "Negro society exercised its freedom to extract universal patterns and re-cast them into its own term."
Culture, not genetics, determines how a person feels and writes, Ellison said. "For example, a black author friend of mine returned from France saying the beauty of the Notre Dame cathedral was alien to him as a black man. I told him it was also alien to the large majority of Frenchmen who had no part in designing or constructing it."
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