Damien B . Schlarb | Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (original) (raw)
Papers by Damien B . Schlarb
Ambiances. Environnement sensible, architecture et espace urbain, 2020
This article proposes to shift the scholarly focus from the conceptually, terminologically, and m... more This article proposes to shift the scholarly focus from the conceptually, terminologically, and methodologically fuzzy notion of “immersion” to the concept of “immersivity,” and thus from a discussion of experiences to an analysis of the productive forces that enable such experiences (aesthetic and otherwise). Using case studies from theme parks, film, and immersive theatre to video games and immersive educational spaces, we argue that immersivity is a distinct term that denotes an inherent quality of objects in general and of mediated, delineated, real and virtual spaces in particular. We assume that in all of these examples, spatial qualities and modes interact in particular ways to facilitate immersion. Elucidating these interactions requires discussing examples from different disciplinary contexts. It is precisely through this interdisciplinary approach that we take a first step towards understanding immersivity, as we pinpoint cross-disciplinary congruences wherever possible. The article thus offers the starting point for a transdisciplinary, qualitative, experimental, and analytical model of immersivity. Following a theoretical introduction to the topic of immersion, we will first conceptualize our interdisciplinary understanding of immersion and immersivity and then launch into a transdisciplinary dialogue about examples of immersive spaces.
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2017
This essay is concerned with Herman Melville’s mediation of the wisdom tradition in the Old Testa... more This essay is concerned with Herman Melville’s mediation of the wisdom tradition in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. I situate Melville’s novel Moby-Dick at the intersection of literary studies, the philosophy of religion, and the transatlantic cultural history of the Bible to challenge older scholarly depictions of Melville as a religiously subversive and irreverently skeptical author. In doing so, I build on recent work by scholars such as Ilana Pardes, Jonathan Cook, and Zachary Hutchins, all of whom have read Moby-Dick as being not only religiously iconoclastic but also productive and even reverent towards the Bible. However, many of these discussions have not addressed to what extent Melville harnesses the skepticism towards religious belief that resides within the Bible itself. Using the example of the Book of Job, a text that has received prolific literary responses in romanticism, as a point of comparison, I show how Melville mediates the language and themes of bibl...
Conference Presentations by Damien B . Schlarb
German Association for American Studies, 2022
This paper examines the relationship between economics and technology as manifested in the utopia... more This paper examines the relationship between economics and technology as manifested in the utopian rhetoric of “Big Tech” or “Silicon Valley.” I am interested in the ways economic and technological forms overlap and collide under paradoxical signifiers like “innovation” and “disruption.” Technology companies regularly deploy these terms to suggest that not only their products but their entire way of operating constitutes new thinking that breaks with established, allegedly dysfunctional, regulations. Meanwhile, the ways in which these companies generate profits (cheap labor, political lobbying, public funding, mergers, monopoly-seeking, stock buybacks) seem anything but new, and such practices often have little to do with inventing new technologies or innovating products. Apple, Facebook, Uber, and others promise deliverance from the pressures of modern life through futuristic technologies. They deploy a deterministic moral register that posits innovation as the highest good, one which can incidentally only be achieved under what they term “free-market conditions,” that is, a political economy that is supply-side oriented. Adrian Daub notes that “tech companies make their home between the moment some new way to make money is discovered and the moment some government entity gets around to deciding if it’s actually legal” (2). These companies obfuscate the economic underpinnings of their ventures—for instance, by conflating terms like invention and innovation—while emphasizing their utopian rhetoric. The now defunct medical-technology start-up Theranos, for instance, attracted capital by promising technology that would work eventually but that turned out to be scientifically unfeasible. Economics and (science) fiction thus seem to converge, a trend evidenced by the emergence of academic discourses like economist Robert Shiller’s “narrative economics.” I offer two close readings of recent media objects to illustrate this cultural dynamic: first, the recent film Don’t Look Up (2021) controversially contemplated the end of the world by natural disaster while simultaneously envisioning the salvation of the super rich by Big Tech. Second, the video game Horizon Zero Dawn (2016) negotiates the ambivalent entanglements of tech culture and capitalism by positing technology as both Damocles sword (under Big Tech) and life raft (under military direction) for humankind.
Herman Melville’s Redburn has traditionally been read as initiation novel (Miller, Bell, Dillingh... more Herman Melville’s Redburn has traditionally been read as initiation novel (Miller, Bell, Dillingham, Sten). Aligned with the recently renewed interest in Melville and religion, yet still painting within the lines of the classic initiation argument, Wyn Kelly recently argued that Redburn traverses a Biblical city of Cain on his wanderings through Liverpool. However, none of these accounts have considered in detail the novel’s commentary on the textual history of the Bible and its transformation from a dogmatic to what historian Jonathan Sheehan has called a cultural document in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. What is more, most classical studies on Melville and religion have limited their contemplation of his work to ferreting out the presence of a personal spiritual crisis. In contrast, I argue for the presence of a systematic and prolonged engagement with the cultural afterlife and exegetical tradition of the Christian Bible in Melville’s oeuvre. While Melville considered Redburn (and its companion piece White-Jacket) somewhat dismissively as “two jobs which I have done for money,” the novel is part of a multifaceted engagement with the authority of the Bible. This paper argues that in Redburn Melville allegorizes the experience of the Bible’s post-Enlightenment loss of dogmatic authority in order to gauge its new status as a cultural document that becomes open to multifarious, non-theological interpretations. In the novel, the eponymous protagonist Redburn uses his father’s guidebook to navigate the labyrinthine streets of Liverpool, yet he quickly realizes that none of the landmarks that had defined his father’s experience of the city remain intact. His attempt to get closer to his father by literally following in his footsteps fails due to the guidebook’s inability to depict accurately the city’s contemporary layout. To Redburn, this discrepancy between recorded and material reality appears as a sense of loss, alloyed with romantic nostalgia for coherence. Eventually, Redburn realizes that he must replace the guidebook’s lost literal correspondences with new metaphorical meanings, based on his experiences traversing the city. Therefore, his emotional and experiential maturation only begins when he changes his hermeneutic approach to the text. Thus, the novel asks whether there are—as old Redburn claims—guidebooks that are exempt from the ordinances of time and change, or whether their inability to map accurately the material world exclusively constitutes their value and utility. As an allegory, the book ponders how the Bible may be read as a spiritual guidebook in an age of transatlantic and transnational transit. By depicting spacial traversal as a metaphor for spiritual exploration, the novel puts in relief two related forms of crossing: one geographical (crossing the Atlantic to Liverpool), the other epistemological (transitioning from a transatlantic culture steeped in Biblical legalism to one that uses the Bible as a storage house of cultural artefacts in the early to middle 1800s).
Debunking the myth of hyper-intellectualism and myopic doctrinism of the New England Protestant P... more Debunking the myth of hyper-intellectualism and myopic doctrinism of the New England Protestant Puritans, recent scholarship in Early American Studies has reconsidered the role of sympathy in Puritan theological texts. According to this line of argument, foundational texts such as John Winthrop’s farewell sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” not only sought audiences’ intellectual assent but also advocated the emotional foundation of community. This paper considers the presence of what Ebert Van Engen has called fellow-feeling in relation to the legalist hermeneutics in Early American Protestant texts. Specifically, I ask how contract logic, most prominently expressed in Protestant covenant theology, interacts with sentiment as the basis of community. What logical relations connect these two communal frameworks? And how do seventeenth-century authors harmonize them? I argue that both the appeal to fellow feeling and the appeal to legal obligation, found in New England covenant theology, are parts of a narrative sequence. This narrative inscribes English colonists into a well-known typological structure of the history of salvation. The fabula of this story consists of the act of becoming worthy of covenant by rallying to the banner of fellow feeling and consequently. Biblical exegeses thus dramatizes the struggle of awakening the communal spirit of fellow feeling and the subsequent huddling together of the community of saints under the aegis of the covenant.
The paper contributes to the current renegotiation of religion and theology in the field of class... more The paper contributes to the current renegotiation of religion and theology in the field of classical American Literature by inserting Melville into what Elisa New identifies as an alternative religious tradition to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist Christology. It considers the cantos “An Apostate,” “Under the Mountain,” and “The Priest and Rolfe” from Herman Melville’s Clarel as systematically critiquing scientific empiricism and German Higher Criticism of the Bible. The poems in question assess the forms and contents of Old Testament theology, as to their epistemological viability, by dramatizing their implications for human interactions with the material world. During his own travels in Palestine, Melville noted that he felt historical criticism of the Bible impaired his own aesthetic experience of the “ecclesiastical countries” as it robs believers of the “bloom” of Biblical mysticism (Journals 97). While regarded elsewhere as an emancipatory practice over against the colonialist tendencies of Christianity, empiricism, in Clarel, sterilizes material reality, stripping it of its historicity and its epistemological value, and thereby impeding the individual’s heuristic search for truth. Melville’s unease toward this process is predicated on his poetic interrogation of Old Testament wisdom literature and its moral aphorisms. As a case in point, the three poems cited above ponder geological excavations as an attack on the material integrity of the Palestinian landscape itself. In the face of this danger, Rolfe, the quintessential religious skeptic, ironically finds himself defending religious tradition against the irreverent assault of scientism. In addressing the holy land’s ambivalent function as both text and place, Melville executes a hermeneutics of contemplation and deploys it in response to the danger of empirical reductionism of spiritual issues.
Accounts of spectral appearances, or ghost stories, such as Cotton Mather’s narrative in Wonders ... more Accounts of spectral appearances, or ghost stories, such as Cotton Mather’s narrative in Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) of a Bostonian who is visited by the ghost of his murdered brother who returns to indict his killer, occupy an ambiguous position within the framework of the eighteenth-century American theology and the culture of letters. In this brief narrative, Mather proposes the intersecting spheres of supernatural and criminal justice, harmonized by the pious narrative voice. In Possessions (2003), her study on the depiction of hauntings in the Hudson River Valley, Judith Richardson recently noted that a haunting always marks “an intervention, an occupation, a claim of priority and possession” (174). As such, ghost stories point to the common hermeneutical root of Puritan theology and British Common law while challenging the rationalist and literalist foundations of these systems of knowing. In the case of Mather’s narrative, the ghost story exposes the shortcomings of the contemporary legal culture while situating the events described within providential history by transfixing them in rationalist genre of legal testimony.
Nineteenth-century authors carry on Early American writers’ attempts at synthesizing the ambivalent meaning of apparitions but do so in the medium of narrative fiction. Nineteenth-century short narratives, therefore, can help us account for the epistemological challenges ghost stories presented to Early American written culture. Authors of the 1800s problematize the tradition of political usage of ghost stories. Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow,” several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, and Herman Melville’s “The Apple-Tree Table” ponder the strategic use of reports about apparitions as well as their potential fraudulent uses.
In this paper I argue that ghost stories chronicle the opposition between deterministic, legal culture and more flexible, metaphorical forms of knowing in Early American writing. The reception of this rift in nineteenth-century short fiction makes transparent the complex ideological operations of Early American legal language. I will explore these contact zones by considering the hermeneutical operations involved in integrating supernatural apparitions into Puritan theology and, in a second step, the critical review of this process by subsequent generations of American writers.
Works Cited
Richardson, Judith. Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.
Book chapters by Damien B . Schlarb
Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies , 2022
The History of American Poetry: Contents - Developments - Readings, 2015
Encyclopedia of Video Games, 2021
Encyclopedia of Video Games, 2021
Encyclopedia of Video Games, 2021
Handbook of the American Short Story, 2022
Known primarily for his novels, Herman Melville also brought to bear hissocial criticism, wide in... more Known primarily for his novels, Herman Melville also brought to bear hissocial criticism, wide intellectual and historical compass, and a sardonic sense ofhumor on the short-fiction genre. The two stories discussed here ponder Americantechno-modernity and an emerging globalized market economy informed by genderand class divisions. The two-parted story“The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tarta-rus of Maids”contrasts two scenes of leisure and labor and portrays the compart-mentalizing thinking behind transnational capitalism and how it differentiatespeople by gender, class, and region.“The Lightning-Rod Man”satirizes nineteenth-century American valorizations of science (scientism) and traces the roots of that fer-vor to the religious revival movements of the day. On the surface, the story allegorizesthe emerging rift between science and religion, mass culture, and democratic individ-ualism. Yet Melville shows how, underneath a veneer of cultural competition, religionand technology share discursive and institutional histories.
Handbook of the American Short Story, 2022
N.K. Jemisin’s stories illustrate her political commitment to social justiceand diversity. She ca... more N.K. Jemisin’s stories illustrate her political commitment to social justiceand diversity. She cannily plays with American literary traditions, from romanticistpoetry to the African American and the New Orleans short story, balancing betweenneo-romanticism, steampunk, and Afrofuturism. In doing so, she explores themessuch as the transformative potential of lesbian sexuality, Black consciousness, andthe prospects of social and economic justice in a globalized late-capitalist world
Doing Cultural History. Insights, Innovations, Impulses, 2018
Books by Damien B . Schlarb
Oxford University Press, 2021
In Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Damien B. S... more In Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Damien B. Schlarb explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Schlarb argues that attending to Melville's engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help us understand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture. In wisdom, which addresses questions of theology, radical skepticism, and the nature of evil, Melville finds an ethos of critical inquiry that allows him to embrace modern analytical techniques, such as higher biblical criticism. In the medium of literature, he articulates a new way of accessing the Bible by marrying the moral and spiritual didacticism of its language with the intellectual distance afforded by critical reflection, a hallmark of modern intellectual style.
Book Reviews by Damien B . Schlarb
ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2020
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2020
Ambiances. Environnement sensible, architecture et espace urbain, 2020
This article proposes to shift the scholarly focus from the conceptually, terminologically, and m... more This article proposes to shift the scholarly focus from the conceptually, terminologically, and methodologically fuzzy notion of “immersion” to the concept of “immersivity,” and thus from a discussion of experiences to an analysis of the productive forces that enable such experiences (aesthetic and otherwise). Using case studies from theme parks, film, and immersive theatre to video games and immersive educational spaces, we argue that immersivity is a distinct term that denotes an inherent quality of objects in general and of mediated, delineated, real and virtual spaces in particular. We assume that in all of these examples, spatial qualities and modes interact in particular ways to facilitate immersion. Elucidating these interactions requires discussing examples from different disciplinary contexts. It is precisely through this interdisciplinary approach that we take a first step towards understanding immersivity, as we pinpoint cross-disciplinary congruences wherever possible. The article thus offers the starting point for a transdisciplinary, qualitative, experimental, and analytical model of immersivity. Following a theoretical introduction to the topic of immersion, we will first conceptualize our interdisciplinary understanding of immersion and immersivity and then launch into a transdisciplinary dialogue about examples of immersive spaces.
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2017
This essay is concerned with Herman Melville’s mediation of the wisdom tradition in the Old Testa... more This essay is concerned with Herman Melville’s mediation of the wisdom tradition in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. I situate Melville’s novel Moby-Dick at the intersection of literary studies, the philosophy of religion, and the transatlantic cultural history of the Bible to challenge older scholarly depictions of Melville as a religiously subversive and irreverently skeptical author. In doing so, I build on recent work by scholars such as Ilana Pardes, Jonathan Cook, and Zachary Hutchins, all of whom have read Moby-Dick as being not only religiously iconoclastic but also productive and even reverent towards the Bible. However, many of these discussions have not addressed to what extent Melville harnesses the skepticism towards religious belief that resides within the Bible itself. Using the example of the Book of Job, a text that has received prolific literary responses in romanticism, as a point of comparison, I show how Melville mediates the language and themes of bibl...
German Association for American Studies, 2022
This paper examines the relationship between economics and technology as manifested in the utopia... more This paper examines the relationship between economics and technology as manifested in the utopian rhetoric of “Big Tech” or “Silicon Valley.” I am interested in the ways economic and technological forms overlap and collide under paradoxical signifiers like “innovation” and “disruption.” Technology companies regularly deploy these terms to suggest that not only their products but their entire way of operating constitutes new thinking that breaks with established, allegedly dysfunctional, regulations. Meanwhile, the ways in which these companies generate profits (cheap labor, political lobbying, public funding, mergers, monopoly-seeking, stock buybacks) seem anything but new, and such practices often have little to do with inventing new technologies or innovating products. Apple, Facebook, Uber, and others promise deliverance from the pressures of modern life through futuristic technologies. They deploy a deterministic moral register that posits innovation as the highest good, one which can incidentally only be achieved under what they term “free-market conditions,” that is, a political economy that is supply-side oriented. Adrian Daub notes that “tech companies make their home between the moment some new way to make money is discovered and the moment some government entity gets around to deciding if it’s actually legal” (2). These companies obfuscate the economic underpinnings of their ventures—for instance, by conflating terms like invention and innovation—while emphasizing their utopian rhetoric. The now defunct medical-technology start-up Theranos, for instance, attracted capital by promising technology that would work eventually but that turned out to be scientifically unfeasible. Economics and (science) fiction thus seem to converge, a trend evidenced by the emergence of academic discourses like economist Robert Shiller’s “narrative economics.” I offer two close readings of recent media objects to illustrate this cultural dynamic: first, the recent film Don’t Look Up (2021) controversially contemplated the end of the world by natural disaster while simultaneously envisioning the salvation of the super rich by Big Tech. Second, the video game Horizon Zero Dawn (2016) negotiates the ambivalent entanglements of tech culture and capitalism by positing technology as both Damocles sword (under Big Tech) and life raft (under military direction) for humankind.
Herman Melville’s Redburn has traditionally been read as initiation novel (Miller, Bell, Dillingh... more Herman Melville’s Redburn has traditionally been read as initiation novel (Miller, Bell, Dillingham, Sten). Aligned with the recently renewed interest in Melville and religion, yet still painting within the lines of the classic initiation argument, Wyn Kelly recently argued that Redburn traverses a Biblical city of Cain on his wanderings through Liverpool. However, none of these accounts have considered in detail the novel’s commentary on the textual history of the Bible and its transformation from a dogmatic to what historian Jonathan Sheehan has called a cultural document in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. What is more, most classical studies on Melville and religion have limited their contemplation of his work to ferreting out the presence of a personal spiritual crisis. In contrast, I argue for the presence of a systematic and prolonged engagement with the cultural afterlife and exegetical tradition of the Christian Bible in Melville’s oeuvre. While Melville considered Redburn (and its companion piece White-Jacket) somewhat dismissively as “two jobs which I have done for money,” the novel is part of a multifaceted engagement with the authority of the Bible. This paper argues that in Redburn Melville allegorizes the experience of the Bible’s post-Enlightenment loss of dogmatic authority in order to gauge its new status as a cultural document that becomes open to multifarious, non-theological interpretations. In the novel, the eponymous protagonist Redburn uses his father’s guidebook to navigate the labyrinthine streets of Liverpool, yet he quickly realizes that none of the landmarks that had defined his father’s experience of the city remain intact. His attempt to get closer to his father by literally following in his footsteps fails due to the guidebook’s inability to depict accurately the city’s contemporary layout. To Redburn, this discrepancy between recorded and material reality appears as a sense of loss, alloyed with romantic nostalgia for coherence. Eventually, Redburn realizes that he must replace the guidebook’s lost literal correspondences with new metaphorical meanings, based on his experiences traversing the city. Therefore, his emotional and experiential maturation only begins when he changes his hermeneutic approach to the text. Thus, the novel asks whether there are—as old Redburn claims—guidebooks that are exempt from the ordinances of time and change, or whether their inability to map accurately the material world exclusively constitutes their value and utility. As an allegory, the book ponders how the Bible may be read as a spiritual guidebook in an age of transatlantic and transnational transit. By depicting spacial traversal as a metaphor for spiritual exploration, the novel puts in relief two related forms of crossing: one geographical (crossing the Atlantic to Liverpool), the other epistemological (transitioning from a transatlantic culture steeped in Biblical legalism to one that uses the Bible as a storage house of cultural artefacts in the early to middle 1800s).
Debunking the myth of hyper-intellectualism and myopic doctrinism of the New England Protestant P... more Debunking the myth of hyper-intellectualism and myopic doctrinism of the New England Protestant Puritans, recent scholarship in Early American Studies has reconsidered the role of sympathy in Puritan theological texts. According to this line of argument, foundational texts such as John Winthrop’s farewell sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” not only sought audiences’ intellectual assent but also advocated the emotional foundation of community. This paper considers the presence of what Ebert Van Engen has called fellow-feeling in relation to the legalist hermeneutics in Early American Protestant texts. Specifically, I ask how contract logic, most prominently expressed in Protestant covenant theology, interacts with sentiment as the basis of community. What logical relations connect these two communal frameworks? And how do seventeenth-century authors harmonize them? I argue that both the appeal to fellow feeling and the appeal to legal obligation, found in New England covenant theology, are parts of a narrative sequence. This narrative inscribes English colonists into a well-known typological structure of the history of salvation. The fabula of this story consists of the act of becoming worthy of covenant by rallying to the banner of fellow feeling and consequently. Biblical exegeses thus dramatizes the struggle of awakening the communal spirit of fellow feeling and the subsequent huddling together of the community of saints under the aegis of the covenant.
The paper contributes to the current renegotiation of religion and theology in the field of class... more The paper contributes to the current renegotiation of religion and theology in the field of classical American Literature by inserting Melville into what Elisa New identifies as an alternative religious tradition to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist Christology. It considers the cantos “An Apostate,” “Under the Mountain,” and “The Priest and Rolfe” from Herman Melville’s Clarel as systematically critiquing scientific empiricism and German Higher Criticism of the Bible. The poems in question assess the forms and contents of Old Testament theology, as to their epistemological viability, by dramatizing their implications for human interactions with the material world. During his own travels in Palestine, Melville noted that he felt historical criticism of the Bible impaired his own aesthetic experience of the “ecclesiastical countries” as it robs believers of the “bloom” of Biblical mysticism (Journals 97). While regarded elsewhere as an emancipatory practice over against the colonialist tendencies of Christianity, empiricism, in Clarel, sterilizes material reality, stripping it of its historicity and its epistemological value, and thereby impeding the individual’s heuristic search for truth. Melville’s unease toward this process is predicated on his poetic interrogation of Old Testament wisdom literature and its moral aphorisms. As a case in point, the three poems cited above ponder geological excavations as an attack on the material integrity of the Palestinian landscape itself. In the face of this danger, Rolfe, the quintessential religious skeptic, ironically finds himself defending religious tradition against the irreverent assault of scientism. In addressing the holy land’s ambivalent function as both text and place, Melville executes a hermeneutics of contemplation and deploys it in response to the danger of empirical reductionism of spiritual issues.
Accounts of spectral appearances, or ghost stories, such as Cotton Mather’s narrative in Wonders ... more Accounts of spectral appearances, or ghost stories, such as Cotton Mather’s narrative in Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) of a Bostonian who is visited by the ghost of his murdered brother who returns to indict his killer, occupy an ambiguous position within the framework of the eighteenth-century American theology and the culture of letters. In this brief narrative, Mather proposes the intersecting spheres of supernatural and criminal justice, harmonized by the pious narrative voice. In Possessions (2003), her study on the depiction of hauntings in the Hudson River Valley, Judith Richardson recently noted that a haunting always marks “an intervention, an occupation, a claim of priority and possession” (174). As such, ghost stories point to the common hermeneutical root of Puritan theology and British Common law while challenging the rationalist and literalist foundations of these systems of knowing. In the case of Mather’s narrative, the ghost story exposes the shortcomings of the contemporary legal culture while situating the events described within providential history by transfixing them in rationalist genre of legal testimony.
Nineteenth-century authors carry on Early American writers’ attempts at synthesizing the ambivalent meaning of apparitions but do so in the medium of narrative fiction. Nineteenth-century short narratives, therefore, can help us account for the epistemological challenges ghost stories presented to Early American written culture. Authors of the 1800s problematize the tradition of political usage of ghost stories. Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow,” several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, and Herman Melville’s “The Apple-Tree Table” ponder the strategic use of reports about apparitions as well as their potential fraudulent uses.
In this paper I argue that ghost stories chronicle the opposition between deterministic, legal culture and more flexible, metaphorical forms of knowing in Early American writing. The reception of this rift in nineteenth-century short fiction makes transparent the complex ideological operations of Early American legal language. I will explore these contact zones by considering the hermeneutical operations involved in integrating supernatural apparitions into Puritan theology and, in a second step, the critical review of this process by subsequent generations of American writers.
Works Cited
Richardson, Judith. Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.
Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies , 2022
The History of American Poetry: Contents - Developments - Readings, 2015
Encyclopedia of Video Games, 2021
Encyclopedia of Video Games, 2021
Encyclopedia of Video Games, 2021
Handbook of the American Short Story, 2022
Known primarily for his novels, Herman Melville also brought to bear hissocial criticism, wide in... more Known primarily for his novels, Herman Melville also brought to bear hissocial criticism, wide intellectual and historical compass, and a sardonic sense ofhumor on the short-fiction genre. The two stories discussed here ponder Americantechno-modernity and an emerging globalized market economy informed by genderand class divisions. The two-parted story“The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tarta-rus of Maids”contrasts two scenes of leisure and labor and portrays the compart-mentalizing thinking behind transnational capitalism and how it differentiatespeople by gender, class, and region.“The Lightning-Rod Man”satirizes nineteenth-century American valorizations of science (scientism) and traces the roots of that fer-vor to the religious revival movements of the day. On the surface, the story allegorizesthe emerging rift between science and religion, mass culture, and democratic individ-ualism. Yet Melville shows how, underneath a veneer of cultural competition, religionand technology share discursive and institutional histories.
Handbook of the American Short Story, 2022
N.K. Jemisin’s stories illustrate her political commitment to social justiceand diversity. She ca... more N.K. Jemisin’s stories illustrate her political commitment to social justiceand diversity. She cannily plays with American literary traditions, from romanticistpoetry to the African American and the New Orleans short story, balancing betweenneo-romanticism, steampunk, and Afrofuturism. In doing so, she explores themessuch as the transformative potential of lesbian sexuality, Black consciousness, andthe prospects of social and economic justice in a globalized late-capitalist world
Doing Cultural History. Insights, Innovations, Impulses, 2018
Oxford University Press, 2021
In Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Damien B. S... more In Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Damien B. Schlarb explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Schlarb argues that attending to Melville's engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help us understand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture. In wisdom, which addresses questions of theology, radical skepticism, and the nature of evil, Melville finds an ethos of critical inquiry that allows him to embrace modern analytical techniques, such as higher biblical criticism. In the medium of literature, he articulates a new way of accessing the Bible by marrying the moral and spiritual didacticism of its language with the intellectual distance afforded by critical reflection, a hallmark of modern intellectual style.