...character. If one seeks a definition of the process, it might be Ellison's delineation of the blues: "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically"...

..."blues" and the ethnic American experience, Ralph Ellison has written in Shadow and Act: "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism."" To lament and to laugh at once, out of the pain of being Indian — and the pride — is...

...within the tradition. Its inwardness is well caught by Ralph Ellison when he derives the blues from "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it ... by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism" (Shadow and Act, p. 78). On the printed...

...process, it might be Ralph Ellison's definition of the blues, which appears in Shadow and Act: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically."...

...selfobservations would give form in Invisible Man to what, in Black Boy again as in the blues, was an "impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism."5" His 1944 short story, "King of the Bingo Game," had left Ellison confident of having mastered...

...in The Antioch Review, Summer, 1945. He began by defining the form as a symbolic action: The Blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. 54 55 and concluded : Let us close with one final word about the Blues: Their attraction...

...becomes engaged. What these values arc is expressed in Ellison's famous definition of "the blues": "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, nearcomic lyricism." (Shadow and Act, 78) It is this quality of American Negro folk sensibility that Ellison...

...quoted passage from 12 Million Black Voices pale beside Ellison's classic description of the blues as "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...but by squeezing from it a neartragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically."37...

...kann mich daher hier auf die wichtigste Aussage Ellisons beschränken. Er versteht unter Blues [...] an Impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically....

...musical articulation of private anguish. Ralph Ellison defines the term most eloquently: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes...the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from its near-tragic, nearcomic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal...