Papers by Nicholas Spengler
American Writers, Retrospective Supplement III, 2017
A critical biography of Herman Melville.
the Scottish-born writer Frances Calderón de la Barca (1804Barca ( -1882) ) took up residence in ... more the Scottish-born writer Frances Calderón de la Barca (1804Barca ( -1882) ) took up residence in Madrid after more than two decades in North America, where she had lived variously in Boston, New York, Mexico City, and Washington, D.C. She had traveled to Spain with her youngest sister, Lydia, and with her husband, Ángel, who had been recalled from his long-standing appointment as Spain's ambassador to the United States (from 1835 to 1839, and again from 1844 to 1853) in order to serve as Minister of State within Spain's newly formed Moderate government. This was not her first visit to Madrid, and she was well accustomed to the social expectations placed on the wives of men of state. Nevertheless, in a November 3 letter to her friend William Hickling Prescott, the Boston-based historian and Hispanist, Calderón describes the thrill of escape and anonymity in a foreign city: You can have no idea what a dramatic place this is-no day passes without some event occurring, curious or interesting. Indeed the every day life is strange and varied. Even the streets are a constant source of amusement. As I go to mass every morning in a mantilla with my veil down, so that I am not much known, I have an opportunity of seeing the people in a way which I cannot do when my hours of carriage and etiquette begin. […] The whole is so animated, and the people look so busy and so happy, and the sky is so bright and blue, that it is a pleasure to walk along the streets. (qtd. Fisher and Fisher 2016, 289) Calderón's partaking in the strangeness and variety of everyday life of Madrid depends, somewhat paradoxically, on her ability to blend in with that life, for which the veil of her mantilla serves as both practical accoutrement and emblem. Her indistinguishability from the other "ladies with mantillas going to church like myself" gives her license to walk the streets and to get to know the city without being "much known" herself-a license that ends as soon as she steps back into Madrid's social and political elite as Madame Calderón de la Barca, dealing with the "troublesome" business of arranging places for guests, "from the august
Textual Practice
This article takes an object-oriented approach to the analogies between weather events and politi... more This article takes an object-oriented approach to the analogies between weather events and political events in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) and Frederick Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave' ( ), arguing that marine weathers in these maritime fictions take the measure of the political without being reducible to it. I integrate political-ecological theories of emergency and 'emergence' with the analogic poetics of both objectoriented philosophy and critical race studies to show how stormy weather in these texts carries a special charge in articulating an emergent politics of Black democracy.
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 2019
This essay reads the “Dog-King” sketch from “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles” (1854) as an all... more This essay reads the “Dog-King” sketch from “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles” (1854) as an allegory of trans-American authoritarian violence, and as a deconstruction of the narrative means used to mitigate that violence. Tarnmoor, the narrative persona to whom Melville attributes “The Encantadas” as it first appeared in Putnam’s, curiously expresses sympathy for this “unfortunate Creole” who uses vicious dogs to police his Galápagos colony until his subjects revolt and force him into exile. I argue that Tarnmoor’s “creole sympathies”—a phrase I use to describe how white Americans across the hemisphere related to each other affectively and materially—reflect not only the ambivalence of the antebellum United States regarding Spanish America but also its investment in maintaining white creole authority in the face of black and indigenous resistance. I uncover a number of probable sources in order to demonstrate the hemispheric resonances of the sketch, from the immediate scope of the Galápagos and post-independence Spanish America, to the deeper history of canine warfare in the Americas, beginning with Columbus and extending to Zachary Taylor. Finally, I consider the place of Cuba itself as a locus of “creole sympathies” as well as anxieties about the spread of non-white rebellion.
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Papers by Nicholas Spengler