後現代主義的概念乃是今日文學研究的主要課題，其定義學者間人言言殊。以純美學的術語而言，後現代主義被定義為文學結構的極端片斷；以政治和歷史的術語而言，後現代主義則是全盤顛覆並與過去截然斷裂。我對非裔美國作家瑞夫．艾理森的《隱形人》之解讀，旨在理解、探索艾理森分析美國社會中的種族壓迫與宰制之後現代層面。艾理森透過口述性與識字兩者的文化和認識差異來進行剖析。我將口述與識字刻劃為兩種基本上不同的認識論模式 (或認識與理解)，提出如下之觀點：艾理森之運用與處理這兩種模式在政治上具有顛覆西方文明的種族宰制的意涵，此等顛覆意涵界定典型的後現代主義的片斷和顛覆。

The concept of the postmodern is a major topic in liter-ary studies today, and has been variously defined by different scholars. Postmodernism has been defined in purely aesthetic terms as radical fragmentation of literary structure, and in political and historical terms as total subversion and absolute break from the past. My reading of the novel Invisible Man by the black American author Ralph Ellison is an attempt to understand and explore various aspects of the postmodern in Ellison's analysis of racial oppression and domination in American society. Ellison's analysis is done in terms of the cultural and epistemic differences between orality and literacy. Characterizing the oral and the literate as offering two fundamentally different modes of epistemology (or knowing and understanding), I suggest that Ellison’s engagement with and treatment of these two modes have politically subversive implications on racial domination in Western civilization, and that such subversive implications define the fragmenta-tion and subversion typical of postmodernism.