Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman
Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman

Author: Michael Jonik

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-02-22

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1108372821

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Studies of the writing of Herman Melville are often divided among those that address his political, historical, or biographical dimensions and those that offer creative theoretical readings of his texts. In Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, Michael Jonik offers a series of nuanced and ambitious philosophical readings of Melville that unite these varied approaches. Through a careful reconstruction of Melville's interaction with philosophy, Jonik argues that Melville develops a notion of the 'inhuman' after Spinoza's radically non-anthropocentric and relational thought. Melville's own political philosophy, in turn, actively disassembles differences between humans and nonhumans, and the animate and inanimate. Jonik has us rethink not only how we read Melville, but also how we understand our deeply inhuman condition.

Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman
Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman

Author: Michael Jonik

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-02-22

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1108369049

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Studies of the writing of Herman Melville are often divided among those that address his political, historical, or biographical dimensions and those that offer creative theoretical readings of his texts. In Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, Michael Jonik offers a series of nuanced and ambitious philosophical readings of Melville that unite these varied approaches. Through a careful reconstruction of Melville's interaction with philosophy, Jonik argues that Melville develops a notion of the 'inhuman' after Spinoza's radically non-anthropocentric and relational thought. Melville's own political philosophy, in turn, actively disassembles differences between humans and nonhumans, and the animate and inanimate. Jonik has us rethink not only how we read Melville, but also how we understand our deeply inhuman condition.

A Political Companion to Herman Melville
A Political Companion to Herman Melville

Author: Jason Frank

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-01-07

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 0813143888

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Herman Melville is widely considered to be one of America's greatest authors, and countless literary theorists and critics have studied his life and work. However, political theorists have tended to avoid Melville, turning rather to such contemporaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to understand the political thought of the American Renaissance. While Melville was not an activist in the traditional sense and his philosophy is notoriously difficult to categorize, his work is nevertheless deeply political in its own right. As editor Jason Frank notes in his introduction to A Political Companion to Herman Melville, Melville's writing "strikes a note of dissonance in the pre-established harmonies of the American political tradition." This unique volume explores Melville's politics by surveying the full range of his work -- from Typee (1846) to the posthumously published Billy Budd (1924). The contributors give historical context to Melville's writings and place him in conversation with political and theoretical debates, examining his relationship to transcendentalism and contemporary continental philosophy and addressing his work's relevance to topics such as nineteenth-century imperialism, twentieth-century legal theory, the anti-rent wars of the 1840s, and the civil rights movement. From these analyses emerges a new and challenging portrait of Melville as a political thinker of the first order, one that will establish his importance not only for nineteenth-century American political thought but also for political theory more broadly.

Subversive Genealogy
Subversive Genealogy

Author: Michael Rogin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1985-04-18

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780520051782

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This book makes several claims which ought to be stated at the outset: that Herman Melville is a recorder and interpreter of American society whose work is comparable to that of the great nineteenth-century European realists; that there was crisis of bourgeois society at midcentury on both continents, but that in America it entered politics by way of slavery and race rather than class; that the crisis called into question the ideal realm of liberal political freedom, and also that Melville was particularly sensitive to the American crisis because of the political importance of his clan and the political history of his family

Herman Melville
Herman Melville

Author: Corey Evan Thompson

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1476642710

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This reference work covers both Herman Melville's life and writings. It includes a biography and detailed information on his works, on the important themes contained therein, and on the significant people and places in his life. The appendices include suggestions for further reading of both literary and cultural criticism, an essay on Melville's lasting cultural influence, and information on both the fictional ships in his works and the real-life ones on which he sailed.

Melville's Democracy
Melville's Democracy

Author: Jennifer Greiman

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2023-01-31

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 1503634329

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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.

A New Companion to Herman Melville
A New Companion to Herman Melville

Author: Wyn Kelley

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2022-08-29

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 1119668506

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Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville 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 contributing authors highlight the ways in which 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, religion, 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 symposium 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.

Empire for Liberty
Empire for Liberty

Author: Wai Chee Dimock

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-08-10

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0691234566

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Wai Chee Dimock approaches Herman Melville not as a timeless genius, but as a historical figure caught in the politics of an imperial nation and an "imperial self." She challenges our customary view by demonstrating a link between the individualism that enabled Melville to write as a sovereign author and the nationalism that allowed America to grow into what Jefferson hoped would be an "empire for liberty."

Herman Melville and the American Calling
Herman Melville and the American Calling

Author: William V. Spanos

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9780791475645

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Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U.S.-led global “war on terror.”

Herman Melville in Context
Herman Melville in Context

Author: Kevin J. Hayes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 697

ISBN-13: 1316761924

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Herman Melville in Context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the multifaceted life and times of Herman Melville, a towering figure in nineteenth-century American and world literature. The book grounds the study of Herman Melville's writings to the world that influenced their composition, publication and recognition, making it a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, students and general readers. Bringing together contributions covering a wide range of topics, the collection of essays covers the geographical, social, cultural and literary contexts of Melville's life and works, as well as its literary reception. Herman Melville in Context will enable readers to approach Melville's writings with fuller insight, and to read and understand them in a way that approximates the way they were read and understood in his time.