Jim Trueblood and His Critic-Readers: Ralph Ellison's Rhetoric of Dramatic Irony and Tall Humor in the Mid-Century American Literary Public Sphere.

This essay discusses the Trueblood episode in the book "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison in which Jacobs made a race and class-based intervention into the public sphere. Ellison's novel intervenes via what Raymond Williams termed residual culture, a resource of a subaltern subculture slighted by elitists discourse. By finally understanding Trueblood's joke the invisible man discovers a rhetoric linked with community needs that empowers him to break out of the hegemonic discourse that has misshaped his conceptions, thus exemplifying Ellison's essay, "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke."