The Poetics of Allegory and Enchantment in Melville's Americas

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.

Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature, 2019

Melville’s fictional narrative The Encantadas (1854) and his letter to his brother Gansevoort, a democratic politician who passionately supported U.S expansionism, will allow us to explore Melville’s politics of action; i.e., his critique of the Mexican war and his doubts about Manifest Destiny. Simone De Beauvoir, French writer and feminist, insists that we are ethically compelled to do all we can to change oppressive institutions. De Beauvoir demonstrates the need to take sides, acting politically and with an ethical vision. Her action illustrates the links she sees between the embodied individual consciousness and political action. For her the alternative is simple and clear-cut. Either you align yourself with the “contemporary butchers rather than their victims” (1962: 20) or reject their atrocities and stand against them through active fights. The idea of narrative secrecy - Hunilla’s rape - is gradually revealed to the reader through Melville’s narrative omission revealing the...

Syllabus, 2013

What does literature do? How does it move the mind? Incite the imagination? In “The Mirror and the Mask,” Borges writes about a storyteller who tells three tales in three different literary modes. It is the argument of this course that form invites a certain manner of thinking. What does each form do? To contemplate this question further we will engage the historical, in particular the historical social circumstances that enable different forms. We will explore the transnational connections amongst different literatures, regions, and languages of the Americas, imagined collectively as the “New World.” We will study a range of fiction and nonfiction texts that explore issues of power, identity and history in colonial times and their effects in the postcolonial period. The comparatist perspective of the course invites attention to the historical contexts for the emergence of (trans)national New World identities and discussions of literary exchange and influence across the Americas. We will raise such questions as: How does literature play a role in constructing people’s visions of the world? In what traditions do the texts we read participate? How do those traditions overlap and differ? We will address these questions by reading several texts from the “New World,” situating the texts with respect to one another, as well as texts from the “Old World.” Our readings will explore themes such as discovery and conquest, “the discovery self makes of the other,” romance, revolution, slavery and dictatorships (Todorov 3). We will examine how particular literary texts and genres are shaped by and intervene in these histories.

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012

American Literature, 1984

have shown to characterize Melville's fiction. 4 Still, as Redburn says, each generation must write its own guidebooks. Given the wealth of scholarship already devoted to every phase of Melville's literary genius, a new guidebook is here offered mainly for those uncharted political, theological, and philosophical byways of his longer narratives. In fact, the dramatic impact of these works hinges, in large degree, on such previously overlooked or underemphasized contexts. For instance, I shall show how, in Typee through Mardi, categories derived from Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins concerning the "nature of true virtue" allow us to appreciate the process by which Melville structures his critiques of "civilization," Manifest Destiny, and the Mexican War. And even though Melville disparaged Redburn and White-Jacket as being "two jobs, which I have done for money" (L, 91), Redburn, I maintain, evokes political and theological concerns that assist our perception of how that work dramatizes what Alexis de Tocqueville defined as the isolationist tendencies of Jacksonian "individualism." Following this, my chapter

The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2013

A recurring gag in Jeff Smith's acclaimed graphic novel series Bone (1991–2004) is that Moby-Dick (1851) is a snoozer. But, as we argue, Herman Melville's masterpiece puts other characters to sleep not because it is dull but because its most ardent advocate – protagonist Fone Bone himself – is a New Critic bent on divorcing the novel from the context in which it was created or might be read. By contrast, Bone's frequent invocations of Moby-Dick (Smith's favourite novel) recontextualize Melville, transforming the book from aesthetic artefact into a critical imagining of contemporary America. To borrow Henry Jenkins's assessment of Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's theatrical adaptation of Meville's novel, Smith sees Melville ‘as part of a larger process of sampling and remixing stories and themes already in broader cultural circulation gives us a way to think about the poetics and politics of contemporary grassroots creativity’. The most successful example of the 1990s' comics artists' self-publishing movement, Bone samples and remixes high culture and low, the epic and the comic, allegory and adventure in order to transform both the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth-century comic into a complex, contradictory meditation on power, nation, and citizenship in America at the millennium.

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.

American Literature, 2010