Ahab Unbound
Title | Ahab Unbound PDF eBook |
Author | Meredith Farmer |
Publisher | U of Minnesota Press |
Pages | 613 |
Release | 2022-04-19 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1452961093 |
Why Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear—and our compassion Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human. Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work. Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar Martínez Benedí, U of L’Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John’s College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.
Sailing without Ahab
Title | Sailing without Ahab PDF eBook |
Author | Steve Mentz |
Publisher | Fordham Univ Press |
Pages | 199 |
Release | 2024-04-02 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 1531506348 |
Journey through uncharted literary waters and explore Melville’s epic in bold new light Come sail with I. We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant’s rage, the ship’s crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without. This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue—launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It’s not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I. Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I welcome you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can—back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It’s the turning that matters. It’s a blue wonder world that beckons.
Maladies of the Will
Title | Maladies of the Will PDF eBook |
Author | Jennifer L. Fleissner |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 499 |
Release | 2022-12-16 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0226822028 |
"Western modernity rests on the notion of individual will, of the autonomous subject able to chart a path toward self-determination. Yet today that notion seems neither plausible nor desirable, in part because of the ways that novels have long questioned it. The novel typically takes the will as a site of insufficiency or excess-from obsession to indecision, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner's ambitious book shows how the novel's attention to these maladies of the will has made it a form of ongoing interrogation, both invested and critical, of modernity's core premises from within. Fleissner ranges from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth, showing how the novel participated in conversations around the topic of will that reached across theology, moral and political philosophy, medicine, criminology, and the nascent social sciences. While taking its place beside other major works in the theory of the novel, it departs from them in its focus on the often more philosophically minded American novel-both canonical instances like Hawthorne and James, and important, still insufficiently recognized voices like those of Elizabeth Stoddard and Charles W. Chesnutt. Fleissner recovers a long tradition, for which the novel is central, of understanding the will not as a problem to overcome but as one which we have no choice but to continue to think through"--
The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick
Title | The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick PDF eBook |
Author | David Haven Blake |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 255 |
Release | 2024-12-13 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0197780512 |
The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick offers the first book-length study of how physical disability shapes one of the world's most iconic novels. Rather than see Ahab's lost limb as a deficiency, however, it explores the way that his prosthesis becomes both a means to power and a key figure for understanding the role that Islamic cultures play in the novel's plot and form.
Melville's Democracy
Title | Melville's Democracy PDF eBook |
Author | Jennifer Greiman |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Pages | 438 |
Release | 2023-01-31 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1503634329 |
For Herman Melville, the instability of democracy held tremendous creative potential. Examining the centrality of political thought to Melville's oeuvre, Jennifer Greiman argues that Melville's densely figurative aesthetics give form to a radical reimagining of democratic foundations, relations, and ways of being—modeling how we can think democracy in political theory today. Across Melville's five decades of writing, from his early Pacific novels to his late poetry, Greiman identifies a literary formalism that is radically political and carries the project of democratic theory in new directions. Recovering Melville's readings in political philosophy and aesthetics, Greiman shows how he engaged with key problems in political theory—the paradox of foundations, the vicious circles of sovereign power, the fragility of the people—to produce a body of radical democratic art and thought. Scenes of green and growing life, circular structures, and images of a groundless world emerge as forms for understanding democracy as a collective project in flux. In Melville's experimental aesthetics, Greiman finds a significant precursor to the tradition of radical democratic theory in the US and France that emphasizes transience and creativity over the foundations and forms prized by liberalism. Such politics, she argues, are necessarily aesthetic: attuned to material and sensible distinctions, open to new forces of creativity.
The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance
Title | The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance PDF eBook |
Author | Leon Chai |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Pages | 459 |
Release | 2019-05-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1501745662 |
The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance illuminates the process by which the cultural legacy of European Romanticism was assimilated by and transformed in the literature of mid-nineteenth-century America. Leon Chai traces the development various governing concepts or tendencies from their genesis in British, French, and German Romantic traditions through their subsequent appropriation by such American writers as Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. Among the topics he addresses are the shift from allegory to symbolism; selected trends in Romantic science; the secularization of religion; the emergence of a historical consciousness and a philosophy of history; pantheism; the relation of subjectivity to objectivity in Romantic philosophy; and Romantic poets.
The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman
Title | The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 721 |
Release | 2024-02-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0192647784 |
More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.