Report: Melville Society—Bezanson Archive Fellowship 2016

The first part of this article confronts the ways in which translation scholars have drawn on insights from narratology to make sense of the translator's involvement in narrative texts. It first considers competing metaphors for conceptualizing the translator's involvement, arguing for a clearer differentiation between modes of framing and telling. Next, it evaluates the ways in which translation scholars have attempted to integrate the translator as a separate textual agent in governing models of narrative communication, concluding that the conceptual gains to be reaped from positing the translator as a separate enunciator or agent in narrative transactions are limited. The second part of the article analyzes two Dutch translations of Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno, by Johan Palm (1950) and Jean Schalekamp (1977) respectively. Rather than striving to isolate the translators as separate tellers or co-producers of narrative structure, the analysis reveals that their agency shows foremost in the ways the 'voiceless' narrative of New World slavery is perspectivized in view of changing readerly expectations.

2003

This thesis explores aspects of Melville's presentation of both the whale and the human bodies in Moby-Dick and human bodies in other important novels. It argues that Melville uses his presentation of bodies to explore some of the versions of confinement those bodies experience, and by doing so, analyses the psychology which subtends that confinement. Throughout Melville's works bodies are confined, both within literal spatial limits and by the psychology which creates and/or accepts these spatial limits. The thesis argues that perhaps the most important version of bodily confinement Melville addresses is the impulse to conquer bodies, both that of the other and one's own. It adopts a largely psychoanalytic approach to interpreting bodies and their impulse to conquer, so that the body is seen to figure both in its actions and its external appearance the operations of the inner psyche. The figure of the body is equally prevalent in Melville's exploration of nationalist conquest, where, as with Manifest Destiny and antebellum expansionism, the psychological and physical lack experienced by characters can be read as motivating factors in the ideology of conquest. A final important strand of the thesis is its argument in favour of a gradual shift in Melville's interpretation of the value and possibility of genuine communion between human beings and between humans and the whale. One may read Typee as an attempt by Melville to explore the possibility of a this-worldly utopia in which human beings can return to a version of primitive interconnectedness. This exploration may be seen to be extended in Moby-Dick, particularly in Ishmael's attempts to find communion with others and in some moments of encounter with the whales. The thesis uses phenomenology as a theory to interpret what Melville is trying to suggest in these moments of encounter. However, it argues, finally, that such encounter, or 'intersubjectivity' is eventually jettisoned, especially in the works after Moby-Dick. By the end of Melville's life and work, any hope of an intersubjective utopia he may have harboured as a younger man have been removed in favour of a refusal actually to assert any final 'truth' about social, political or even religious experience. Billy Budd, his last body, is hanged, and his final word is silence.

As works which had similarly evoked slave-ship revolt as topics for their prose fictions in the mid-1850s, Douglass’s The Heroic Slave and Melville’s Benito Cereno offer noticeably distinct aesthetic, rhetorical, and stylistic presentations of slave rebellion and of conflict itself—that is, conflict as an aesthetic device within narrative as well as the thing being narrated, the manifestation of force between actors aboard the slave ship. Because the enforcement of US law and security by 1850 tended toward something supra-territorial if not transnational in scope and range—in fact, superseding the interests of the national body politic—Douglass and Melville also had to conceptualize how conflict was attendant with this enforcement, how conflict manifested both on a grander scale and in specific instances and intensities. The figure of the fugitive allowed each to theorize, dramatically and imaginatively, a set of relations that reflected their conceptualizations of conflict and strife within their nineteenth-century moment—conceptualizations, too, of US power if we understand this power as an arrangement that makes possible certain orders or types of conflict.

American Literature, 2010

This paper proposes to read Herman Melville's South Sea novels Ту pee, Mard through the concept of "ethnic ventriloquism": the white American subject critique ilization by assuming an ethnic subject position. This ethnic posing stands in curiou native agency itself: the Other cannot speak because the white beachcomber has al for him. A curious relationship emerges between this well-meaning advocacy of eth and the presence of the actual Other who might set out to jeopardize or repudiate t Imperialist critique is at once self-critique: the Other vanishes in the margins of whit spection. This self-introspection, however, can be deconstructed through the idea o readers of the civilization critique advanced in Typee, Omoo, and Mardi. The notion readers returns the project of ethnic ventriloquism to its sender. Once the Other choo in his own voice, there may be nothing left for the beachcomber but to fall silent.

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.

2020

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 2009

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012

Studies in American Fiction, 1994

Despite the ideological bent ofAmerican literary scholarship in the last decade, Melville's narratives ofthe South Seas have scarcely been analyzed in terms of macropolitics, that is, in the context of major political realities such as colonialism and imperialism.1 Typee, for instance, has been seen as a critique ofthe ills ofcivilization or a discovery about the morality of cannibals, but the colonial politics of its narration, the recording ofthe lives ofdisempowered "natives" by the privileged Westerner, have been largely unexplored, intimately connected though these narratives are with the colonial politics ofthe South Sea Islands. Typee, and to an extent Omoo and Mardi, are texts in which the Melvillean narrator, although highly critical ofcolonialism, nonetheless affirms his position as colonist in order to maintain the separation between himself and the natives, a separation on which his racial and cultural identity depends. At the same time that these narratives dramatize transgressive situations which challenge boundaries between civilized and savage, they attempt to contain the moments oftransgression so that the boundaries remain intact. This essay will focus mainly on Typee, the most politicized ofthe three narratives.