Browsing by Subject "Melville"
Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Developing hypotheses : evolutions in the poetics of Whitman and Melville(2013-05) McGinnis, Eileen Mary; Kevorkian, Martin, 1968-In the foundational scholarship on literature and evolution, there remains a tendency to focus on Darwinian evolution's influence on Victorian literature. Without ignoring Darwin's importance to both the late-19th century and our own time, this dissertation contributes to an emerging interest among historians and literary scholars in exploring the pre-Darwinian, transatlantic contexts of evolutionary discourse. By returning to a time when 'the development hypothesis' was a more fluid concept, we can examine how writers and poets on both sides of the Atlantic were able to actively shape its meanings and to use it as a framework for reflecting on their literary craft. In this dissertation, I argue that for Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, development is a key term in their particular constructions of a distinctive American literature in the 1840s and '50s. It underlies Whitman's conception of an experimental poetic voice in the 1855 Leaves of Grass as well as Melville's ambitions for literary narrative in Mardi and Moby-Dick. At the same time, the sweep of their careers well beyond the publication of Origin of Species in 1859---into the last decade of the nineteenth century---allows us to chart their later responses as evolution increasingly gained acceptance and Darwin became a front man of sorts for evolution. Although Whitman and Melville continue to incorporate evolution and scientific modernity into their late-career self-fashioning, we can trace a movement toward increasing distance, disillusionment, and abstraction in these deployments. This dissertation has implications not only for contemporary Whitman and Melville studies but also for re-assessing the broader trajectory of 19th-century American literary history. In conventional textbook accounts, the influence of Darwinian evolution is measured primarily in terms of the emergence of literary naturalism, a realist genre known for its unsparing look at lives caught in the scope of unsympathetic natural forces. Here, I suggest that developmental evolution offered alternative formal and epistemological possibilities for mid-19th-century American literature, enabling Whitman and Melville to develop hypotheses about literary truth and human value.Item Eldritch desires : queer illegibility and proto-cosmicism in Melville's "The Bell-Tower"(2014-05) Omidsalar, Alejandro; Kevorkian, Martin, 1968-This report combines queer theory with the cosmicist philosophy of early twentieth-century horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft to ask new questions about Herman Melville's treatments of gender and genre in "The Bell-Tower," one of his more obscure short stories. Though the tale has been commonly represented as an exemplar of both the Oedipal complex and Gothic horror, my reading reveals a negative, anti- humanist epistemology and very complex presentations of gender and sexuality at work in the text. This peculiar combination indicates a heretofore-unnoticed line of descent from Melville's story to a still-thriving movement in the horror genre.Item Repressions of the open sea : contesting modernity in nineteenth century literature of Brazil, Britain, and the United States(2016-08) DeStafney, John Watford; Roncador, Sônia; Kornhaber, David; Afolabi, Omoniyi; MacDuffie, Allen; Wilks, JenniferComprising a cold war that endured from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade held the promise of a new phase of modernity in which the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution would be realized so that human liberty, rights, cosmopolitanism, and social justice would flourish at the center of an increasingly international politics. However, nineteenth century maritime literature from the imperial Atlantic nations of Brazil, Britain, and the United States -- all of which were deeply and distinctly involved in the controversy over the traffic -- decried the frustration of these ideals both before and after official acts of abolition and emancipation. As the sea offered unique perspectives on the transnational coloniality underlying the growth of western nations, maritime writers succeeded in disclosing the clandestine colonialist exploitation that sustained the progress of these empires during slavery and after abolition. This comparative dissertation explores literary interrogations of the ideals of western modernity through a synthesis of authors of different race, nationality, and literary status in order to sketch a generic field of western maritime literature. Each of the dissertation’s three chapters focuses on four authors -- Adolfo Caminha, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville receive repeated concentration -- and Brazil, Britain, and the United States are represented in every chapter. Race and the identity of the subject constitutes the central dialogue of the fictions explored in chapter one, which attempt to reconstruct fluid ontologies that evade the strictures of colonialist thinking. Personhood confronts the fluidity of the law in chapter two as maritime texts chart contests and circumventions of law in the extra-sovereign space of international waters. Chapter three examines the intersection of ontology and law through the moral concepts of natural law and crimes against nature, incorporating maritime texts that dramatize the employment of these rhetorical tools of meta-jurisprudence in pursuits of justice that ultimately liberate and oppress. Throughout, the mobile maritime environment and the slave trade foster the imaginative setting through which late-nineteenth century authors reveal the fluctuations of coloniality in western modernity.Item Revolutionary representations in antebellum periodicals(2016-08) Coleman, Megan Catherine; Kevorkian, Martin, 1968-; Lesser, Wayne; Winship, Michael; Cohen, Matthew; Abzug, Robert“Revolutionary Representations in Antebellum Periodicals” examines invocations of the American Revolutionary War in novels serialized during the mid-nineteenth century. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville depicted this foundational conflict and its ideological legacies in periodicals ranging from the antislavery National Era to the sectionalist Southern Literary Gazette, “quality” literary magazines including Putnam’s and the Atlantic Monthly, and the popular women’s and family magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. The first two chapters consider novels that address the legacy of the American Revolution in the antebellum South. Southworth and Stowe portray voluntary manumission as a means for forestalling national dissolution or insurrection in inter-sectional novels published in the National Era. William Gilmore Simms counters their approaches in historical romances that dismiss the imperative of universal emancipation in favor of an assertion of independence from incursive imperial and, subsequently, federal forces. The latter two chapters examine how Melville and Stowe reconciled the narrative aesthetics and demands of biography and romance while complicating the cultural legacies of the Revolution in fictionalized historical biographies of a northern soldier and minister.Item The romance with Melville and American literary history(2014-08) King, Bradley Ray; Carton, EvanThis dissertation traces the historical emergence of what I call the romance with Melville during the postwar moment and argues that its striking endurance demands that we rethink the relationship between the discipline’s past and present. For the enduring vitality of the romance with Melville throughout the twentieth century points to deep continuities across major cuts in the discipline’s history. These continuities that the romance makes visible suggest that the discipline’s past is not so monolithically invested in masculinism, nationalism, and racism as many dominant voices have claimed it was, and also that the discipline’s present has not broken with its predecessors as completely as many had thought. I begin with a chapter that introduces the prevalence of the romance with Melville in American literary history, interrogates why Melville’s work lends itself so readily to this hermeneutic move, and articulates how the persistence of this move upsets the authoritative histories of American literary studies. My second chapter describes how Melville’s final story Billy Budd elicited a remarkably explicit transatlantic conversation about the affective and political ramifications of postwar heteronormativity. Chapter 3 examines C.L.R. James’s conversation with postwar Americanists about Moby-Dick, a conversation in which James sought to galvanize the critical community to fight the anti-democratic Cold War immigration laws under which James himself was being deported. My final chapter analyzes Ralph Ellison’s use of Moby-Dick, “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and The Confidence-Man to argue that American literature is fundamentally concerned with and informed by issues of racial injustice and inequality. In both his literary criticism and his fiction, Ellison, I argue, used Melville’s writing to criticize the racial negligence of American literary critics and to reflect on the ironies of his own abiding loyalty to white canonical writers like Melville. When one follows the various permutations of the romance with Melville in this moment and attends to the contestations it facilitated, one finds a rich, politically multivalent critical discourse that in many important but unacknowledged ways lays the groundwork for the political desires and textual attachments that continue to animate American literary studies.Item The Sphynx; or, Ishmael's Scholarship in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale(2017-05) Cataldo, LuisHerman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is, in some sense, a work of art composed of two distinct books—distinct, but the one means nothing with the other. Moby- Dick is a drama, and The Whale a monograph; the or does not distinguish alternative titles (synonyms), but rather a particular recourse to conjunction, to movement between alternative, though specific, forms of literary composition as a way to express experience. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “The American Scholar,” addressed fourteen years before the composition of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale these very sort of movements between experience, scholarship and poetry: Ishmael, who Melville authored as an author of the book, is as much a scholar as he is a poet. The Whale is his scholarly work (cetology, commercial histories, arcana, art criticism, among others), a part of the book that has not, moreover, attracted much attention in critical studies of Moby-Dick since the 1920s, when Melville studies really began to take form. Ishmael’s scholarship is usually typified as either useful contextualization (a “ballast” necessary for a reader’s understanding of Moby-Dick) or else Melvillean extravagance. Literary critics usually privilege story of Ahab and the Pequod, i.e. those parts that make up Moby-Dick in the understanding of Melville’s book as two, over its counterpart, The Whale. The argument here seeks to undo the rigidity of that critical approach in order to read any particular part of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale on its own terms. In so doing, I attempt to elaborate and develop Emerson’s notion of scholarship, as well as Melville’s adaptations of Emerson’s theory of scholarly expression, using both Melville’s writing at the time of Moby- Dick’s composition (his letters and “Hawthorne and His Mosses”) and Ishmael’s (performative) example in the book itself. Scholarship, on these terms, is highly creative poetic, intuitive, and above all personal; and, still, it is rigorous, self-critical, and conscious of an internal logic. Part of my argument is a performance of this notion of scholarship, namely, taking up a creative and personal style that motivates the evolution of this argument through interrogations of the figures of the Lamp-Light and the Tattoo in the book. I argue for, in other words, a renewal of Emerson’s demands for American scholarship—the need for creative reading (finding the links between literature and everyday life) and for creative writing about those experiences of creative reading.