Herman Melville and the law

Leviathan, 2020

This essay situates Melville' s reading of Edward Gibbon' s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a wider history of historiography and jurisprudence, stretching back into early modern narratives of antiquity and forward into the present. Melville used legal history as a way of crossing the boundaries of genre, linking historical accounts of republican law and corruption to legal transformations occurring in his own time of democratization, continental and overseas expansion, and capitalist economic development. In doing so, he tested the capacity of the novel, story, and poem to fulfill the goal of writing a critical, philosophical, and even natural history of law and legal institutions. That can be instructive for the work of literature and history today. If we feel ourselves caught in a protracted process of imperial decay, a Gibbonian moment, we can also work our way into a more hopeful and productive Melvillean moment by exploring what resources and opportunities exist to write and make new history in the time of the present and for the sake of the future.

Leviathan, 2009

I recently saw a local band playing in San Francisco whose name is “Or, The Whale,” an in-joke for Melvilleans, or perhaps part of a tradition going back to the late 1960s, when another local band named itself Moby Grape. (They played, incidentally, in the Castro, not far from the bar Moby Dick, creating a kind of Melville enterprise zone.) That once unpopular novel has had a surprising influence on popular music, ranging from Led Zeppelin’s fifteen-minute drum solo indulgence titled “Moby Dick” to the techno-musician Moby (Richard Melville Hall), who claims to be distantly related to the author. In the late 1960s, the record label of the folk-rock group the Turtles was called White Whale, presaging a contemporary indie band of the same name. Before the digital age, one could find numerous Moby Disc record stores in the Northeastern United States, and even a Moby Disques near the Panth´eon in Paris, which one imagines would have amused Melville. The musician-artist Laurie Anderson staged a performance piece inspired by Moby- Dick, and Stanley Crouch situated Melville’s opus as a proto-jazz novel for its improvisational verve. Emblematically, it is as if Moby-Dick can be “played” in many keys, or is amenable to many arrangements. However, as I elaborate, almost all references to Melville in popular culture rely on Moby-Dick and a few other sources whose useful indeterminacy or ambiguity allows them to be adapted to as many uses as artists and critics can devise. In the United States, Melville is known in the popular imagination for relatively few works: the “B” trilogy of “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy Budd”; and the well-known but not necessarily well-read Moby-Dick. (In the nineteenth-century, Typee was popular partly through its notoriety, but has receded from public consciousness). On the other hand, relatively few, perhaps even within the academy, read Mardi, the almost wholly ignored Israel Potter and Clarel, and to some degree Pierre and The Confidence-Man. A useful context might be to think of film adaptations of Melville’s work: one could contrast numerous Hollywood productions of Moby-Dick with Leos Carax’s intriguing but singularly inaccessible French adaptation of Pierre, POLA X (an acronym for Pierre Ou Les Ambigu¨ıt´es X, referencing the fact that Carax filmed his tenth screenplay, though perhaps, as with the amplifiers in Spinal Tap, he should have gone to eleven). It is hard to imagine that contemporary Hollywood would bring Pierre to the screen.

Leviathan, 2019

The premise of this essay is that as scholars envision the future of Melville studies, we must also reckon with its past. We focus particular attention on what might be called the first Melville Revival, beginning in 1892 when Elizabeth Melville returned four of Herman' s novels to print. We argue that a considerable amount of the labor that Elizabeth expended sits plainly in archival records, where nonetheless Melville scholars rarely find her. As ours is not, however, the first reconsideration of Elizabeth' s contributions to her husband' s career, the second half of this essay attempts to understand the ways that Melville scholarship has perennially rediscovered Elizabeth over the past fifty years and then, unable to assimilate the discovery, re-forgotten her. Toward this essay' s conclusion, we show that to break this cycle, the future of Melville studies may require a rethinking of what scholars designate by the organizing concept-metaphor "Melville," a rethinking that might expand our scholarly object beyond the man himself to encompass scenes of collaboration in the family and agencies irreducible to the author' s own. It takes time for something false to become self-evident. Pierre Bourdieu

Storia del pensiero politico, 2012

While Melville’s engagement with political issues in Billy Budd is increasingly recognized in legal scholarship, his works hardly receive the attention among political theorists that they deserve. It remains unnoticed that his writings were deeply and directly influenced by the political philosophy tradition, especially but not only Calvinist and American resistance theories, Hobbes, Rousseau, German Idealists, and American Transcendentalists. At the heart of Melville’s claim to founding a new American canon of politico-philosophical literature lay the value of resistance and individual autonomy on the one hand and, on the other, a profound skepticism about the perfectibility of man, leadership, and politics as a collective endeavor.

Leviathan, 2017

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 2000

A New Companion to Herman Melville, 2022

[Note that the attached PDF only shows the front matter. Please contact me if you would like access to any chapter PDFs.] A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the authors highlight the ways that Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated. In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, transatlantic and hemispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers: - A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work - Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel - Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville - In-depth examinations of Melville’s treatment of the natural world - Two symposia sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Leviathan, 2011

esearch by Richard E. Winslow III, conducted mostly in microfilms of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, has again yielded a valuable miscellany of previously unrecorded Melville reviews, notices, and mentions. Herein are collected seventy-eight new items from 1846 to 1899, discovered by Winslow, along with a handful of items found through internet resources. This compilation supplements the dozens of new "Melville Reviews and Notices" that he and Mark Wojnar documented in Melville Society Extracts 124 (February 2003). Like the published discoveries of Winslow and others (accessible in the online archives of Extracts on the Melville Society

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race Religion Gender and Class, 2003