Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time

Leviathan, 2013

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 2012

Leviathan, 2017

2009

Tally reviews Loren Goldner's Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic King, which posits that Melville was the American Marx, exposing the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period around 1848. In this, Goldner follows a tradition of Marxian scholarship of Melville, notably including C.L.R. James, Michael Paul Rogin, and Cesare Casarino. Tally concludes that Goldner's argument, while interesting, is limited by its persistent belief in an American exceptionalism that prevents it from recognizing the postnational force of Melville's novels. In 1953, in a work that is almost without peer in its elegant combination of literary analysis and political theory, C.L.R. James made this astonishing assertion: "The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day remains unsurpassed." 1 In his close readings of Melville's work, James discovered the outlines of the postwar world system, an analysis of the destructive effects of nationalism (as practiced by either the left or the right), the savage exposition of twentieth-century intellectual malaise, and the thoroughgoing critique of industrial capitalism. In a key passage from the same work, James notes that Melville is not only the representative writer of industrial civilisation. He is the only one that there is. In his great book the division and antagonisms and madnesses of an outworn civilisation are mercilessly dissected and cast aside. Nature, technology, the community of men, science and knowledge, literature and ideas are fused into a new humanism, opening a vast expansion of human capacity and human achievement. Moby-Dick will either be universally burnt or be universally known in every language as the first comprehensive statement in

2012

Comparative American Studies, 2008

Americanness is considered a historically specific semantic field which was constituted in the three decades before the Civil War. It was shaped by key concepts among which were nation, race, individualism, nature, and womanhood. Melville unquestionably was concerned with identity. This essay, while attempting to expose the author's idea of Americanness as reflected in his novel Benito Cereno, will also trace its multiple manifestations, ambiguous or controversial at times as they may be, mirroring the protean nature of American identity.

Leviathan. A Journal of Melville Studies.

This essay focuses on how recent trends in global studies can be utilized for the teaching of Moby-Dick in the American Studies classroom. It strongly argues in favor of teaching Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as a transnational cultural trope that has found numerous creative forms of reception and appropriation both in and outside of the U.S. Based on practical accounts of the author’s teaching experience, the essay shows that the book’s adaptations and appropriations offer highly fascinating terrain for students of American Studies and anyone interested in the cultural implications of the translocations of the arts.