Melville’s Philosophies

by Arsic, Branka; Evans, K. L.

• ISBN13: 9781501321016
• ISBN10: 1501321013
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-04-20
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Meville's Philosophies departs from a long tradition of critical assessments of Melville that dismissed his philosophical capacities as ingenious but muddled. Its contributors do not apply philosophy to Melville in order to detect just how much of it he knew or understood. To the contrary, they try to hear the philosophical arguments themselves-often very strange and quite radical-that Melville never stopped articulating and reformulating. What emerges is a Melville who is materialistically oriented in a radical way, a Melville who thinks about life forms not just in the context of contemporary sciences but also ontologically. Meville's Philosophies recovers a Melville who is a thinker of great caliber, which means obliquely but dramatically reversing the way the critical tradition has characterized his ideas. Finally, as a result of the readings collected here, Melville emerges as a very relevant thinker for contemporary philosophical concerns, such as the materialist turn, climate change, and post-humanism.

Author Biography

Branka Arsic is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. She is the author of Bird Relics, Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard, 2015), On Leaving, A Reading in Emerson (2010), Passive Constitutions or 71/2 Times Bartleby (2007). She is co-editor (with Cary Wolfe) of The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (2010) and editor of The American Impersonal (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

K. L. Evans is Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University, USA. Previously she was Associate Professor of Literature and Philosophy at Yeshiva University in New York City. She is the author of Whale! (2003) and Melvillean Mimesis (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

I. ONTOLOGY
1. Pacific Meditations: Moby-Dick and Mana
Mitchell Breitwieser (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
2 Melville and the Inscrutable
Paul Grimstad (Yale University, USA)
3. Dust Archive: Melville on the Origin of Life
Branka Arsic (Columbia University, USA)

II. EPISTEMOLOGY
4. Melvillean Mimesis
K. L. Evans (Cornell University, USA)
5. The Whale as Will and Representation: Melville and the Boundaries of Philosophy
Robert T. Tally Jr. (Texas State University, USA)
6. Clarel and the Spacetime of Melvillean Skepticism
Paul Hurh (University of Arizona, USA)
7. Melville's History of the Philosophy of Science
Maurice Lee (Boston University, USA)
8. Less a Narration than a Reference': Melville's Billy Budd
Stuart Burrows (Brown University, USA)

III. AFFECT
9. Bartleby: A Love Story
Rachel Cole (Lewis & Clark College, USA)
10. Pierre: In Love
Kenneth Dauber (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA)
11. The Iron Crown of Lombardy: Rococo Phenomenology and Melville's Algetic Landscape
Michael D. Snediker (University of Houston, USA)

IV. AESTHETICS
12. Melville and the Fate of Gesture
James D. Lilley (SUNY-Albany, USA)
13. Melville Squinting: Visuality in the Last Decades
Elisa Tamarkin (University of California, USA)
14. Melville, Poetry, Prints
Samuel Otter (University of California, USA)
15. Melville's Historical Lyric
Rhian Williams (University of Glasgow, UK)

V. POLITICS
16. Melville's Leviathan
Paul Downes (University of Toronto, Canada)
17. Melville's Misanthropology and the Limits of the Common
Michael Jonik (University of Sussex, UK)
18. Clarel and the Deforestation of Palestine
Branka Arsic (Columbia University, USA) and Eduardo Cadava (Princeton University, USA)

Index