{"title":"Herman Melville: A Half Known Life Vol. I: Eternal Ifs: Infant, Boy, and Man (1819–1840) Vol. II: Melville at Sea (1840–1846) by John Bryant (review)","authors":"L. Walls","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"24 1","pages":"101 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82169776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
his panel interrogates the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of borders in the works of Herman Melville within a trans-American, hemispheric, and multilingual genealogy of migration. In doing so, we put pressure not only on the naturalization of national borders but also question the conceptual borders that separate the human from the non-human, as well as the disciplinary borders—especially those that fall along racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines—that have traditionally organized Melville scholarship. At thirty years, the
{"title":"MLA 2022—Virtual Panel for Hybrid Convention (Washington DC): MLA 2022","authors":"M. Albanese","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"his panel interrogates the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of borders in the works of Herman Melville within a trans-American, hemispheric, and multilingual genealogy of migration. In doing so, we put pressure not only on the naturalization of national borders but also question the conceptual borders that separate the human from the non-human, as well as the disciplinary borders—especially those that fall along racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines—that have traditionally organized Melville scholarship. At thirty years, the","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"11 1","pages":"118 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74066525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Among the many complex stylistic features that contribute to the enduring appeal of Moby-Dick is Ishmael’s tendency to effect sudden, often perplexing shifts in attitude and tone of voice, particularly when describing activities associated with whaling. In recent years, Melville scholars have enriched our understanding of this narrative instability by applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts, particularly his dialogical views of language, consciousness, and the novel. This essay argues along similar lines, and examines salient instances of tonal and rhetorical disjuncture in Ishmael’s narrative in light of their dialogical implications. However, the author also posits that some of Ishmael’s tonal anomalies strongly echo the discrepant and ambivalent narrative tone that can be found in Homer’s Iliad. The similarities in tonal discord are made all the more conspicuous by Ishmael’s prominent adoption of literary devices that are closely associated with the epic, such as hypallage and the Homeric simile. One potent effect of this dual-voiced echoing of Homeric narration is to illustrate the seductive resilience of heroic-epic attitudes towards martial glory and honor, which endure in the cultural consciousness, albeit in a state of dialogic tension with voices that value principles of peace, brotherhood, and compassion.
{"title":"Traces of Homer in Ishmael’s Double Vision","authors":"Alan McCluskey","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Among the many complex stylistic features that contribute to the enduring appeal of Moby-Dick is Ishmael’s tendency to effect sudden, often perplexing shifts in attitude and tone of voice, particularly when describing activities associated with whaling. In recent years, Melville scholars have enriched our understanding of this narrative instability by applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts, particularly his dialogical views of language, consciousness, and the novel. This essay argues along similar lines, and examines salient instances of tonal and rhetorical disjuncture in Ishmael’s narrative in light of their dialogical implications. However, the author also posits that some of Ishmael’s tonal anomalies strongly echo the discrepant and ambivalent narrative tone that can be found in Homer’s Iliad. The similarities in tonal discord are made all the more conspicuous by Ishmael’s prominent adoption of literary devices that are closely associated with the epic, such as hypallage and the Homeric simile. One potent effect of this dual-voiced echoing of Homeric narration is to illustrate the seductive resilience of heroic-epic attitudes towards martial glory and honor, which endure in the cultural consciousness, albeit in a state of dialogic tension with voices that value principles of peace, brotherhood, and compassion.","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"3 1","pages":"39 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73621734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MLA 2022—Virtual Panel for Hybrid Convention (Washington DC): Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity","authors":"P. Downes","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"5 1","pages":"121 - 124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75261040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:“The Lightning-Rod Man” has been studied by many critics and admired both as a biting allegorical satire of religious orthodoxy and a humorous story in the traveling salesman genre. While Jay Leyda documented that Herman Melville was actually visited by a local salesman the identity of this person and the specific lightning rod he peddled have never been addressed until this study. Along with the salesman’s visit other local historical events and personages are revealed to help understand Melville’s sources in composing the salesman’s tale.
{"title":"Unmasking the Lightning-Rod Man","authors":"Warren F. Broderick","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:“The Lightning-Rod Man” has been studied by many critics and admired both as a biting allegorical satire of religious orthodoxy and a humorous story in the traveling salesman genre. While Jay Leyda documented that Herman Melville was actually visited by a local salesman the identity of this person and the specific lightning rod he peddled have never been addressed until this study. Along with the salesman’s visit other local historical events and personages are revealed to help understand Melville’s sources in composing the salesman’s tale.","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"238 1","pages":"84 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73266557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay looks at the presence of both figural and actual children in Moby-Dick. I note first that Ahab and others invoke children as alternatives to the destructive world of the Pequod. In this metaphorical sense, children anchor the ship in the domestic world it leaves behind. I note second that the actual children—like Pip, the whaling ship’s cabin boy, and Ishmael’s memory of his own childhood—provide an opportunity for Melville to test the possibilities of figuration. In literary history, the child was closely aligned with the concept of figuration. Literary historians took the “figure” to mean both the original form of something and its representation. Through their plasticity and their representation of adult forms and values, children became vehicles for figuration. However, in Moby-Dick, the treatment of young Ishmael and Pip strains the possibility for the child to be a representation of the values of a community. This is not Ahab’s “sweet childhood of air and sky.” Rather, I argue that through Pip’s loss of a sense of self, Melville brings to the fore the history of violence that contradicts Ahab’s domestic metaphor, setting limits on the possibility of the figure to represent reality.
{"title":"Borne out of Sight: Childhood and the Limits of Figuration in Moby-Dick","authors":"Nicholas Bloechl","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay looks at the presence of both figural and actual children in Moby-Dick. I note first that Ahab and others invoke children as alternatives to the destructive world of the Pequod. In this metaphorical sense, children anchor the ship in the domestic world it leaves behind. I note second that the actual children—like Pip, the whaling ship’s cabin boy, and Ishmael’s memory of his own childhood—provide an opportunity for Melville to test the possibilities of figuration. In literary history, the child was closely aligned with the concept of figuration. Literary historians took the “figure” to mean both the original form of something and its representation. Through their plasticity and their representation of adult forms and values, children became vehicles for figuration. However, in Moby-Dick, the treatment of young Ishmael and Pip strains the possibility for the child to be a representation of the values of a community. This is not Ahab’s “sweet childhood of air and sky.” Rather, I argue that through Pip’s loss of a sense of self, Melville brings to the fore the history of violence that contradicts Ahab’s domestic metaphor, setting limits on the possibility of the figure to represent reality.","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"127 1","pages":"22 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73604920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sailor Talk: Labor, Utterance, and Meaning in the Works of Melville, Conrad, and London by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (review)","authors":"A. Parsons","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"13 1","pages":"102 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75984840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay argues that the oath-taking scenes in "The Quarter-Deck" chapter of Moby-Dick were inspired by Jacques-Louis David's Neoclassical history painting Oath of the Horatii (1784). These scenes, in which Ahab symbolically binds first the three mates and then the three harpooneers to his quest to hunt the white whale, form two of the book's most striking vignettes, vignettes that strongly resemble Oath of the Horatii, a painting Melville would have seen on his 1849 visit to the Louvre. While scholarship has done much to explore Melville's engagement with romanticism in visual art, Melville's use of Oath of the Horatii indicates his engagement with an alternate aesthetic mode, which I discuss as the "aesthetic of the distinct." The aesthetic of the distinct emphasizes a clear, precise, and vivid representation of the sensory world and bespeaks a philosophically realist trust in objective, earth-bound factuality and our ability to reliably glean information from this material reality. Thus, Melville's interest in the aesthetic of the distinct, signaled by his use of Oath of the Horatii as a source in "The Quarter-Deck," evidences the appeal that realist philosophy held for him and provides an aesthetic angle to recent arguments for his realist proclivities.
{"title":"The Oath of the Pequod: Moby-Dick, Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii, and the Aesthetic of the Distinct","authors":"E. Adams","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that the oath-taking scenes in \"The Quarter-Deck\" chapter of Moby-Dick were inspired by Jacques-Louis David's Neoclassical history painting Oath of the Horatii (1784). These scenes, in which Ahab symbolically binds first the three mates and then the three harpooneers to his quest to hunt the white whale, form two of the book's most striking vignettes, vignettes that strongly resemble Oath of the Horatii, a painting Melville would have seen on his 1849 visit to the Louvre. While scholarship has done much to explore Melville's engagement with romanticism in visual art, Melville's use of Oath of the Horatii indicates his engagement with an alternate aesthetic mode, which I discuss as the \"aesthetic of the distinct.\" The aesthetic of the distinct emphasizes a clear, precise, and vivid representation of the sensory world and bespeaks a philosophically realist trust in objective, earth-bound factuality and our ability to reliably glean information from this material reality. Thus, Melville's interest in the aesthetic of the distinct, signaled by his use of Oath of the Horatii as a source in \"The Quarter-Deck,\" evidences the appeal that realist philosophy held for him and provides an aesthetic angle to recent arguments for his realist proclivities.","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"87 1","pages":"23 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76824708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay examines the veering force of speeches in Pierre, which is structured by a tension between the teleological nature of narrative plots and the unexpected effects of verbal performances. In Pierre, linguistic forces, once unleashed, become other—proceeding from obscure, internal impulses with no clear origin but creating in return momentous external constraints that utterers do not control and that make the narration veer. Speech acts create webs of forces, palpable forms of the impalpable, which lead Isabel and Pierre to realize that the "solid land of veritable reality" is also constituted by the gossamer threads of language. Pierre's narrator is careful to dramatize the mechanisms of magical thinking that underlie the characters' practice of magical speech. Examining them through the lens of pragmatic linguistics and anthropology illuminates what happens to language, and through language, in Pierre: magic. Against the teleology of intentions or clear causes, Pierre stages a dramaturgy of multidirectional, random effects that eventually constitute a fate, retrospectively. This foregrounds the role of chance in what Melville calls the "infinite entanglements of all social things" and "complex web of life," and offers striking affinities with Darwin's later images of webs and entanglements in The Origin of Species.
{"title":"The Origin of Speeches (or Lack Thereof): Magical Veerings in Pierre","authors":"Édouard Marsoin","doi":"10.1353/lvn.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the veering force of speeches in Pierre, which is structured by a tension between the teleological nature of narrative plots and the unexpected effects of verbal performances. In Pierre, linguistic forces, once unleashed, become other—proceeding from obscure, internal impulses with no clear origin but creating in return momentous external constraints that utterers do not control and that make the narration veer. Speech acts create webs of forces, palpable forms of the impalpable, which lead Isabel and Pierre to realize that the \"solid land of veritable reality\" is also constituted by the gossamer threads of language. Pierre's narrator is careful to dramatize the mechanisms of magical thinking that underlie the characters' practice of magical speech. Examining them through the lens of pragmatic linguistics and anthropology illuminates what happens to language, and through language, in Pierre: magic. Against the teleology of intentions or clear causes, Pierre stages a dramaturgy of multidirectional, random effects that eventually constitute a fate, retrospectively. This foregrounds the role of chance in what Melville calls the \"infinite entanglements of all social things\" and \"complex web of life,\" and offers striking affinities with Darwin's later images of webs and entanglements in The Origin of Species.","PeriodicalId":36222,"journal":{"name":"Leviathan (Germany)","volume":"107 1","pages":"34 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81259685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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