Detestable as Joint-Stock Companies and Nations: Melville and the International (original) (raw)
Related papers
Historical Materialism, 2009
Tally reviews Loren Goldner's Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic King, which posits that Melville was the American Marx, exposing the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period around 1848. In this, Goldner follows a tradition of Marxian scholarship of Melville, notably including C.L.R. James, Michael Paul Rogin, and Cesare Casarino. Tally concludes that Goldner's argument, while interesting, is limited by its focus on American exceptionalism and by ignoring the postnational force of Melville's novels.
2005
ion, just as exchange value and value for Marx are abstractions from the sensuousness concrete reality ("use value") of particular commodities. (It is interesting that "whiteness" for Melville becomes "blankness" when collective action recedes as a reality in his work.) Marx's transformation of the "thing", the object, into a relationship in the critique of political economy is paradigmatic for all the above-mentioned ideological expressions of the 1848-1850 tremor in the North Atlantic world. And 14-"Einerseits verwandeln sie Kapital aus einem Verhältnis in ein Ding...Die Oekonomen fassen das Kapital nicht als Verhältnis auf." ("On one hand they (the economists-L.G.) transform capital from a relationship into a thing...The economists do not interpret capital as a relationship." (my translation). K. Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, Pt. 3, in K. Marx/F. Engels, Werke, vol. 26.3, Berlin 1972, pp. 268-269.
A New Companion to Herman Melville
A New Companion to Herman Melville, 2022
[Note that the attached PDF only shows the front matter. Please contact me if you would like access to any chapter PDFs.] A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the authors highlight the ways that Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated. In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, transatlantic and hemispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers: - A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work - Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel - Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville - In-depth examinations of Melville’s treatment of the natural world - Two symposia sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.
“Or, the Whale”: Unpopular Melville in the Popular Imagination, or a Theory of Unusability
Leviathan, 2009
I recently saw a local band playing in San Francisco whose name is “Or, The Whale,” an in-joke for Melvilleans, or perhaps part of a tradition going back to the late 1960s, when another local band named itself Moby Grape. (They played, incidentally, in the Castro, not far from the bar Moby Dick, creating a kind of Melville enterprise zone.) That once unpopular novel has had a surprising influence on popular music, ranging from Led Zeppelin’s fifteen-minute drum solo indulgence titled “Moby Dick” to the techno-musician Moby (Richard Melville Hall), who claims to be distantly related to the author. In the late 1960s, the record label of the folk-rock group the Turtles was called White Whale, presaging a contemporary indie band of the same name. Before the digital age, one could find numerous Moby Disc record stores in the Northeastern United States, and even a Moby Disques near the Panth´eon in Paris, which one imagines would have amused Melville. The musician-artist Laurie Anderson staged a performance piece inspired by Moby- Dick, and Stanley Crouch situated Melville’s opus as a proto-jazz novel for its improvisational verve. Emblematically, it is as if Moby-Dick can be “played” in many keys, or is amenable to many arrangements. However, as I elaborate, almost all references to Melville in popular culture rely on Moby-Dick and a few other sources whose useful indeterminacy or ambiguity allows them to be adapted to as many uses as artists and critics can devise. In the United States, Melville is known in the popular imagination for relatively few works: the “B” trilogy of “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy Budd”; and the well-known but not necessarily well-read Moby-Dick. (In the nineteenth-century, Typee was popular partly through its notoriety, but has receded from public consciousness). On the other hand, relatively few, perhaps even within the academy, read Mardi, the almost wholly ignored Israel Potter and Clarel, and to some degree Pierre and The Confidence-Man. A useful context might be to think of film adaptations of Melville’s work: one could contrast numerous Hollywood productions of Moby-Dick with Leos Carax’s intriguing but singularly inaccessible French adaptation of Pierre, POLA X (an acronym for Pierre Ou Les Ambigu¨ıt´es X, referencing the fact that Carax filmed his tenth screenplay, though perhaps, as with the amplifiers in Spinal Tap, he should have gone to eleven). It is hard to imagine that contemporary Hollywood would bring Pierre to the screen.
"Bonapartes and Sharks": The Political Philosophy of Herman Melville
Storia del pensiero politico, 2012
While Melville’s engagement with political issues in Billy Budd is increasingly recognized in legal scholarship, his works hardly receive the attention among political theorists that they deserve. It remains unnoticed that his writings were deeply and directly influenced by the political philosophy tradition, especially but not only Calvinist and American resistance theories, Hobbes, Rousseau, German Idealists, and American Transcendentalists. At the heart of Melville’s claim to founding a new American canon of politico-philosophical literature lay the value of resistance and individual autonomy on the one hand and, on the other, a profound skepticism about the perfectibility of man, leadership, and politics as a collective endeavor.