Bellow and Grossman: Modern Jewish Literatures

YESHIVA COLLEGE/ SPRING 2011

ENG 2086 BELLOW AND GROSSMAN: MODERN JEWISH LITERATURESSECTION 331 T 3:00PM, TH 3:45PM BELFER 207

DR. Adam Zachary Newton212.960.5400. x6876

[email protected] Belfer 518 Office Hours: W 3-5

Philip Roth recently remarked that the two most important bodies of 20th century American should be credited to William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. For half of this course, we will read one of them: selected works by Bellow (b. 1913, Lachine, Quebec; d. Brookline, MA, 2005), including Henderson the Rain King and his masterpiece, Herzog. Whether acknowledged or not, welcomed or revisited, Bellow’s realist-modernist figure looms large over thelandscape of subsequent American Jewish literature. David Grossman (b. 1954, Jerusalem) is the preeminent postmodern Joseph-figure to the three generations of Israeli writers preceding him. His most recent novel, To the End of the Land, has transfixed Israeli society (and now, non-Hebrew speaking readers)in a way few Hebrew novels preceding it have, with the exception,perhaps, of A. B. Yehoshua’s Mr Mani published in 1989.

Using the trope of “the neighbor,” this course will explore the intriguing cross-hatching that results when these two premier Jewish writers of fiction are discussed in the same breath…or semester. Are they indeed “Jewish writers of fiction” or rather “writers of Jewish fiction” (whatever that is)? How important is thisquestion of inter-generational “priority?” How do we move from “modern” to “postmodern” in these two instances? What are the cultural politics that inform the two literary traditions, and which filiations can be drawn between the Israeli and American cultural “scenes?” How indeed might we survey this landscape? These and other questions will shape our inquiry about one of America’s and one of Israel’s greatest prose writers. In addition

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to their novels, we will also look at essays by and interviews with both authors.

Saul BellowThe Victim HerzogHenderson the Rain KingRavelstein“Him With His Foot in His Mouth”“Something to Remember Me BY”“Zetland: By a Character Witness”

David GrossmanThe Book of Intimate GrammarSee: Under LoveTo the End of the Land

This course is a 2000 level “Traditions” course in the English Major designed to pose questions about literary history and literary tradition like, “how do texts generate histories? and, where do history, text, and cultural contextintersect?” As a T2000 course, it fulfills the , it fulfills the 1st or 2nd semester of the current two-semester literature requirement for graduation from Yeshiva College, and can also be used towards the major in English.

Course requirements and grade percentages Mandatory attendance/Sedulous Participation

40% Weekly postings to the discussion forum on Angel

10% One shorter essay—5-7 pages

20% One longer essay—10 pages

30%

Course materials:

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1) Saul Bellow, Herzog Penguin 01424372982) Saul Bellow, Ravelstein Penguin 01410017633) Saul Bellow, The Victim Penguin 01401893864) Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (any edition) 5) Saul Bellow, Collected Stories 01420016436) David Grossman, See Under: Love Picador 03124206927) David Grossman, To the End of the Land Knopf 03075929798) David Grossmna, The Book of Intimate Grammar Picador 0312420951

The primary texts are available through the Yeshiva College Bookstore at www. http://yeshivabookstore.bkstore.com. You may also order these books from Amazon.com or Half.com, and are welcome to used previously owned copies if you can obtain them. The packet will be distributed the first day of class. From time to time I will also give you handouts as necessity or serendipity dictate.

THIS DOCUMENT: You are responsible for familiarizing yourself with the syllabus and the information it details. Make sure you have read it thoroughly, and return to from time to time during the semester. It represents your first act of close reading.

ATTENDANCE POLICY: Your attendance is crucial to the success of our collective endeavor. You are expected to attend class regularly and consistently, and to prepare your work attentively—that is, please be both present and present. Unless you face themost compelling of excuses, you should not miss a single class. If you accumulate more than two unexcused absences, your grade will drop in half-increments per additional absence (A becomes A-, A- becomes B+, etc. Attendance, informally speaking, duringmy office hours or by appointment is more than welcome. Please seek me out; that is why I’m here.

CLASSROOM ETIQUETTE: Note, first, these two words. We are in a classroom—a brightly-lit, perhaps barren room. There are no tents, stalls, nor the raised decibels of bargaining and over-talking. In other words: this is not the shuk, and neither you nor I are here to hondle. We have more important business to

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transact. In order for us to do so elementary principles of comportment, civility, and deference are in force for this as well as every other class at this institution. Another word forthis is protocol, which comes from the Greek protocollon, meaning firstglue, referring to a leaf glued to a manuscript which described its contents (a metaphor, interestingly, drawn from writing). Social glue enables us to proceed cooperatively by providing a “table” for the interactive “content” to follow. To that end:Please attend to each other. Please come to class on time: your punctuality is as importance as your attendance. Similarly, I request that you not bring foodor drink into the classroom, or go in and out of the classroom while we are in session unless physiologically compelled. Pleaseconfine all conversation with each other to the substantive or critical issue at hand. Be smart, be vocal, be invested; but be temperate and self-aware.Your own voices count more than you know, and believe it or not, I really need to hear them. I will frequently model how to formulate questions and sustain an inquiry, but the point is for you to inculcate that habit for yourselves. Remember that speech is no less theorizable or answerable to conventions than writing. Try to express yourself both thoughtfully and elegantly. Consider your speaking role as dialogic: addressing others but also prompting, catalyzing, opening a space for their interventions. Aside from a craft and art of its own, speech is collective and communal: every word (says one of the theorists you will study) is “half someone

else’s.” Differently put, even our words have י “י “י (la’shem ha’aretz u’loah) inscribed upon them, i.e., use this speech with the owner’s blessing.TECHNOLOGY. Laptops are permitted, but please, NO INDISCRIMINATE SURFING. Mobile phones should be demobilized, and all other electronic devices pocketed.

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THE SCENE OF TEACHING, OF READING, AND OF WRITING. “Pedagogy is a relation, a network of obligations ….To be spoken to is to be placed under an obligation, an initial respect. Nor is this ‘respect’ a matter of deference; it is the simple fact of alertness to otherness.” (Bill Readings, The University in Ruins). I endorse these principles wholeheartedly, and encourage you to do the same. The scene of teaching is the scene of colloquy, of exchange, of call-and-response. No less so is the reading you practice: every sustained act of written expression necessarily elicits, provokes, calls upon a response. This is the parallel meaning of “obligation” and “respect”: the text cannot be left toitself; we are its “advocates.” Moreover, it obligates questions over and above answers. By extension, each student should come prepared to talk back to text by talking with each other and me about it. Thus, for each class-session, the standingassignment is: do exactly that in the form of a short written comment or question for every week’s pair of class-sessions, posted in advance to the Discussion Forum on Angel. This forum will serve as both an opportunity to think through aloud what you are reading (and thus, a kind of journal),and also a preliminary script, a dry-run, for classroom discussion. You may post for either Tuesday’s or Thursday’s class, but please do so before 9Am of that day’s class, and review all postings before you attend (you should photocopy your own posting as well as any others that strike you). On the CourseTab page, click on Lessons, click on the Weekly Discussion ForumsFolder, and click on the relevant weekly forum. The Angel site can be accessed from this link: https://yu.elearning.yu.edu/frames.aspx.

THE SCENE OF GRADING. You will be assigned Letter Grades in thisclass. While that metric is not quantifiably exact, I grade holistically and with rare exceptions, unerringly. A probative instructor will sweat bullets over grades, even if s/he knows that they neither stand nor stand in for the expression and effort they assess. At any rate, they are assigned deliberatively, with care and expertise.  But they are not negotiable. I will always make myself available to discuss the content and execution of your assignments. For as much as I intend to establish dialogue, your specific grades, either on individual

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assignments or for the course, are not up for discussion and will not be changed once posted. See under: not a shuk. If you wish to go over your paper or exam with me,, the composing process behind it (only the product will be visible to me, obviously), or how it may be improved, take a day to re-read it together with my comments (if applicable),then contact me to arrange a specific appointment.

Grade inflation notwithstanding, an "A" will always signify something truly distinctive. The following breakdown of grades is offered so that you have a working sense of the broad distinctions of what each letter signifies.

A Represents outstanding participation in all course activities, perfect attendance, and all assigned work completed on time. Alsorepresents very high quality in all work produced for the course.

B Represents superior participation in all course activities, near perfect attendance, and all assigned work completed on time.Also represents consistently high quality in course work. 

C Represents good participation in all course activities, minimalabsences, and all assigned work completed. Also represents generally good quality overall in course work.

D Represents uneven participation in course activities, uneven attendance, and some gaps in assigned work completed. Represents inconsistent quality in course work. 

CITIZENSHIP. Keeping up with the reading, executing assignments on time, completing the work: this is the bare minimum. Active, enthusiastic , muscular participation, as one of my colleagues soeloquently puts it, also requires a willingness to trust in the merit of our efforts. Your ownership of this course follows fromyour investment in its possibilities, in the critical and imaginative gains it will yield. In a word, citizenship becomes a matter of faith. Thus, to paraphrase famous mishna about the Haggadah, if the syllabus has begun with constraint, it is only to allow our task to conclude with praise, for real and praiseworthy dividends will be reaped in this course by your

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feeling indispensable to it. Citizenship means feeling yourself part of a polis, a collective enterprise, and while I have set certain protocols for your civility, I also want to create a space for you to exercise your civic freedom and become co-participants.

COMMUNICATION AND ACCESSIBILITY. My office hours are Wednesdays, 3Pm to 5PM. This is time reserved for you. Please feel free to meet and talk with me about anything related to the course: its material, any concerns you may have, its meaningfulness and utility. I can also be reached by phone and email. I will always respond to your emails, though not necessarily within twenty-four hours. As a general rule of thumb, an exchange overemail is a precursor to fuller and more transparent face-to-face communication, not a substitute. Please keep in mind comportment in email, a very tricky medium to get right since so many cues we otherwise count on are absent. This means expressing yourself politely and directly, taking the time to write in complete and grammatical sentences, and establishing thecontext of your question or remarks.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY. Plagiarism and cheating are violations of YU’s policy on academic integrity. By registering in this course, you are promising to abide by all the requirements statedin this policy. Students in breach of this policy are liable to penalty, including disciplinary action beyond automatic course failure. Ignorance of what plagiarism involves will not be accepted as an excuse. It is your responsibility to recognize thedifference between statements that do require documentation and those that do not. If you have any questions about documenting outside research and secondary resources and/or you are unsure ofwhen to document secondary resources, please read the following link or check with me: http://www.yu.edu/catalog/undergrad/catalog9899/yeshiva.htm. Theonly acceptable writing help on papers is from the Writing Center.

WORKLOAD. Keep your eyes on the prize. Read faithfully, which means reading thoughtfully and also on pace with the schedule of

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assignments. Use a pen, mark your texts, leave foot (or rather, finger-)prints so you can see where you have been and what you have noticed. If you fall behind or read cursorily you put all of us at a disadvantage, as we should all be endeavoring to remain “on the same page.” A syllabus is not carved in stone; itmay be both added to and subtracted from. From time to time I may hand out ancillary short readings. If, conversely, I see the need to diminish the amount of reading, as may well be the case depending on how we gel as a group, I have no objection to doing so. Please at any rate consult your email accounts often for messages about assignments, discussion forums on Angel, etc.

PLEASURE OF THE TEXT. One of my own former instructors, Elaine Scarry, writes, “Beauty often comes to us through no work of our own, then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor.” The degree to which you exert yourself as readers is also the degree to which you receive—and give back—pleasure. Without of course presuming to legislate, I solicit you to want to express yourself and care about the words you choose and the sentences you shape. Literary criticism and theory—which includes your own contributions—is an essential part of literary experience.

MY PLEASURE OF YOUR TEXT; OR, WRITING. In addition to your weekly postings on Angel, you will write two papers one, 5-7 pp due February 21, and a final 15 pager due May 16. Both dates arenon-negotiable. More explicit guidelines will be forthcoming.

WRITING CENTER. Free Help with Your Writing! The Writing Center,in Furst 202, offers individualized tutoring that can support your writing for this course. All writers need feedback, even strong ones. Make an appointment and find out about drop-in hoursat http://www.yu.edu/writingcenter

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Schedule of readings:

Tues. Jan. 25nd Course Introduction: Dan Miron on “Contiguity”

Thurs. Jan 27th Bellow, “Zetland,” “By the St Lawrence”___________________________________________________________________________

Tues. Feb. 1st Bellow, The Victim

Thurs. Feb 3rd The Victim

_________________________________________________________________________

Tues. Feb 8h Bellow, The Victim

Thurs. Feb 10th The Victim __________________________________________________________________________

Tues. Feb 15th Grossman, See Under: Love

Thurs, Feb. 17th See Under: Love _________________________________________________________________________

Tues. Feb 22nd Grossman, See Under: Love

Thurs. Feb 24th See Under: Love_________________________________________________________________

____

Tues. Feb 1st Grossman, See Under: Love

Thurs. Feb. 3rd See Under: Love_________________________________________________________________

____

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Tues. Mar 1st

Thurs. Mar 3rd _________________________________________________________________

___Tues. Mar 8th NO CLASS

Thurs. Mar 6th NO CLASS

Tues. Mar 15th Bellow, Herzog

Thurs. Mar 17th NO CLASS

Tues. Mar 22nd Bellow, Herzog

Thurs. Mar 24nd Herzog_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tues. Mar. 29th Bellow, Herzog

Thurs. Mar. 31st Herzog

_____________________________________________________________________________

Tues, April 5th Grossman, Book of Intimate Grammar

Thurs. April 7rd Book of Intimate Grammar_____________________________________________________________________________

Tues. Apr. 12th

Thurs. Apr. 14th

_____________________________________________________________________________

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Tues., May 3rd

Thurs. May 5th

Tues. May 10th

Thurs. May 12th

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Course Packet Table of Contents

1. Ellison, Melville manuscript pages2. Harper, Crane, Poems3. Ellison, “Working Notes for Invisible Man”4. Fisher, Democracy and Social Space”5. Sundquist, “Melville, Delaney, and New World Slavery”6. Emerson, “Circles,” “Compensation”7. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses”8. Lawrence, “Herman Melville’s Moby Dick + Textual Note9. Broadhead, Trying All Things”10.Porter, “How to Make Double Talk Speak”11.Buell, “Moby Dick as Sacred Text”12.Royster, “Melville’s Economy of Language”13.McIntosh, “The Mariner’s Multiple Quest”14.Pease, “National Narratives, Postnational Narration”15.Renan, “What is a Nation?”16.Johnson, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd’”17.Weaver, Hayford And Sealts, “The Manuscript of Billy Budd”18.Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”19.Ellison, What American Would Be Without Blacks”20.Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”21.Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”22.Ellison, “A Party Down By the Square”23.Ellison, “Flying Home”

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Select Bibliography(including electronic resources on reserve at YC and

Stern College Libraries)

ELLISON

“Remembering Ralph Ellison” Callaloo 18.2 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v018/18.2ellison_portrait.html

Ross Posnock, The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison Robert G. O'Meally.The Craft of Ralph Ellison Steven C. Tracy.A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison https://yulib002.mc.yu.edu:8443/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/yeshiva/Doc?id=10142492

Harold Bloom, ed. Ralph Ellison John S. Wright.Shadowing Ralph Ellison https://yulib002.mc.yu.edu:8443/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/yeshiva/Doc?id=10157896

Kenneth W. Warren.So Black and Blue : Ralph Ellison and the occasion of criticism

MELVILLE

Jeanetta Boswell. Herman Melville and the Critics : a checklist of criticism, 1900-1978. Richard Chase. Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays. Andrew Delbanco. Melville: His World and Work http://yulib002.mc.yu.edu:2533/lib/yeshiva/Doc?id=10101398

Edgar A. Dryden. Melville's Thematics of Form; The Great Art of Telling the Truth Hardwick, Elizabeth. Herman Melville C. L. R. James. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: the Story of Melville and the World We Live In.F.O. Matthiessen. AmericanRrenaissance; Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman Melville Society extracts [electronic resource] [1978]-c2005.http://QK2NH2GK3H.search.serialssolutions.com/?V=1.0&L=QK2NH2GK3H&S=JCs&C=MELVSOCEX&T=marc

Milder, Robert. Exiled royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine https://yulib002.mc.yu.edu:8443/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/yeshiva/Doc?id=10142427

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Mitchell, Rick. TheCcomposition of Herman Melville [https://yulib002.mc.yu.edu:8443/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/yeshiva/Doc?id=10015831

Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville : a biography Neal Tolchin, Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville

Further reading and research

Ellison

An important web resource is The “Ralph Ellison Webliography”: http://www.centerx.gseis.ucla.edu/weblio/ellison.html

This link will take you to a YULIS list of the important critical essays on Ellison and invisible man from 1988-20o7: http://yulib002.mc.yu.edu:2159/searchCritRef.do

Others useful links:

Bellow, Saul. Man Underground: A review of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man by novelist Saul Bellow, from Commentary, June 1952. At Dr. Al Filreisweb site

Butler, Robert J. (ed.) A review of The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison (Greenwood Press, 2000) In African American Review, Winter, 2001, reviewed by Kerry McSweeney

Callahan, John F. and Christopher C. De Santis. "Some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood": An Interview with John F. Callahan, Editor of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth - Interview in African American Review, Winter, 2000

Callahan, John F. (ed.) Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook . (Oxford

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Univ. Press, 2004). Reviewed in African American Review, Fall, 2005 byRobert Butler

John Corry, "Profile of an American Novelist, A White View of Ralph Ellison" - published in Black World (December 1970--a special Ralph Ellison issue)

Early, Gerald. Decoding Ralph Ellison, in Dissent, Summer 1997

One-Hit Wonder: //www.slate.com/id/2943

Eichelberger, Julia. Review of Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, andEudora Welty. (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1999) In African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Michael Kreyling

Irving Howe, "Black Boys and Native Sons" (a 1963 essay about Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison)

Irving Howe review of Invisible Man - published in The Nation May 10, 1952

Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of a Genius (John Wiley, 2001) Reviewed in Black Issues Book Review, 11/1/01 by Robert Fleming

Ernest Kaiser, "A Critical Look at Ellison's Fiction & at Social & Literary Criticism by and about the Author" (Black World, December 1970

Kim, Daniel Y. "Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man" In Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1997

Mazurek, Raymond A. Writer on the left: Class and race in Ellison's early fiction, in College Literature, Fall 2002

Nadel, Alan. Publisher's blurb for Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (Univ. of Iowa Press, 1991)

Nadel, Alan. "Ralph Ellison and the American Canon"American Literary History - Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2001, pp. 393-404

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Neighbors, Jim. "Plunging history: naming and self-possession in Invisible Man ." African American Review, 6/22/02

Reuben, Paul R. Primary and secondary bibliography for Ralph Ellison, from Dr. Reuben's bibliography web site

Saul, Scott. A review of Juneteenth in the Boston Review, 1999

Shinn, Christopher A. "Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man " - Critical Essay in African American Review, Summer, 2002

Sundquist , Eric J. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. (Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995) Reviewed in MELUS, Spring, 1999 by David Goldstein-Shirley

SSSL Bibliography Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) http://www.missq.msstate.edu/sssl/view.php?wid=429

http://yulib002.mc.yu.edu:2159/searchCritRef.do

Melville

http://www.melville.org/melville.htm The “Life and Works of Herman Melville”— a helpful web resource.http://www.melville.org/ishmail.htm listserv devoted to the discussionand exploration of all Melville-related subjects.

General

Herman Melville's Whaling Years, Wilson Heflin. (Vanderbilt Univ Press, 2004).Herman Melville, Newton Arvin. (Grove Press, 2002).Herman Melville, Elizabeth Hardwick. (Viking Books, 2000).Herman Melville A to Z:   The Essential Reference to His Life and Work , Carl Rollyson. (Facts on File, 2000).Herman Melville:   Moby Dick , Nick Selby. (Columbia Univ Press, 1999).Solitude and Society in the Works of Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, Linda Costanzo Cahir. (Greenwood Press, 1999).The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader, Geoffrey Sanborn. (Duke Univ Press, 1998).

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The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Ed. Robert S. Levine. (Cambridge Univ Press, 1998).Melville: A Biography. Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 1996. Herman Melville: A Biography, Hershel Parker. (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1996).Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Harold Bloom. (Chelsea House, 1996).Herman Melville:   The Contemporary Reviews , Brian Higgins, Hershel Parker & M. Thomas Inge. (Cambridge Univ Press, 1995).A Herman Melville Encyclopedia, Robert L. Gale. (Greenwood Press, 1995).Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance, John Bryant. (Oxford Unif Press, 1993).Some Other World to Find: Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman Melville, Bruce L. Grenberg. (Univ of Illinois Press, 1989).Empire for Liberty:   Melville and the Poetics of Individualism , Wai-chee Dimock. (Princeton Univ Press, 1989).On Melville, Edwin Cady & Louis J. Budd. (Duke Univ Press, 1988).Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville, Neal Tolchin. (Yale Univ Press, 1988).A Companion to Melville Studies, Ed. John Bryant. (Greenwood Press, 1986).Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville, Robert K. Martin. (Univ of North Carolina Press, 1986).Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville, MichaelPaul Rogin. (Knopf, 1983).That Cunning Alphabet:   Melville's Aesthetics of Nature , Richard S. Moore. (Rodopi, 1982).War in Melville's Imagination, Joyce Sparer Adler. (New York Univ Press, 1981).Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America, Carolyn L. Karcher. (Louisiana State Univ Press, 1980).New Perspectives on Melville, Ed. Faith Pullin. (Edinburgh Univ Press,1978).Melville and the Art of Burlesque, Joseph Flibbert. (Rodopi, 1974).The Melville Archetype, Martin Leonard Pops. (Kent State Univ Press, 1970).Melville:   The Ironic Diagram , John D. Seelye. (Northwestern Univ Press, 1970).Melville's Thematics of Form:   The Great Art of Telling the Truth , Edgar A. Dryden. (Johns Hopkins Press, 1968).

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The Wake of the Gods:   Melville's Mythology , H. Bruce Franklin. (Stanford Univ Press, 1967).The Example of Melville, Warner Berthoff. (Princeton Univ Press, 1963).

On Moby Dick

Abel, Darrel, Gary Richard Thompson, and Virgil Llewellyn Lokke. Ruined Eden of the present : Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe : critical essays in honor of Darrel Abel. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1981.Adams, Michael V. "Whaling and Difference: Moby-Dick Deconstructed." New Orleans Review 10.4 (Win. 1983): 59-64.Allen, Gay Wilson. Melville And His World. A Studio book. New York,: Viking Press, 1971.Anderson, Charles R. Melville in the South Seas. NY: Dover Publications, 1966.Andriano, Joseph. "Brother to Dragons: Race and Evolution in Moby-Dick." ATQ 10.2 (Jun 1960): 141+.Arvin, Newton. Herman Melville. Compass books, C20. New York,: Viking Press, 1957.Bercaw, Mary K. Melville's Sources. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987.Berthoff, Warner. "Characterization in Moby Dick." in The Example of Melville. Princeton UP, 1962.Berthoff, Warner. The Example of Melville. Princeton, N.J.,: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1962.Bezanson, Walter E. "Moby Dick: Work of Art.". Moby Dick: Centennial Essays. Ed. Tyrus Hillway & Luther Mansfield. Dallas: SMU, 1953.Bloom, Harold. Ahab. New York: Chelsea House, 1991.Bloom, Harold. Herman Melville. Modern critical views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.Bloom, Harold. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Modern critical interpretations. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.Bluestein, Gene. "Ahab's Sin." Arizona Quarterly. 41.2 (Sum. 1985): 101-116.Bowen, James K., and Richard Vanderbeets. A Critical Guide To Herman Melville; Abstracts Of Forty Years Of Criticism. Glenview, Ill.,: Scott Foresman, 1971.Branch, Watson G. Melville, The Critical Heritage. The Critical Heritage Series. London ; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1974.

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Braswell, William. Melville's Religious Thought; An Essay In Interpretation. New York,: Pageant Books, 1959.Bredahl, A. Carl. Melville's Angles Of Vision. University of Florida humanities monograph no. 37. Gainesville,: University of Florida Press, 1972.Brodhead, Richard H. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.Brodhead, Richard H. New Essays on Moby-Dick. The American Novel. Cambridge Cambridgeshire ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.Brodtkorb, Paul. Ishmael's White World; A Phenomenological Reading Of Moby Dick. Yale publications in American Studies ; 9. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.Bryant, John, and Robert Milder. eds. Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1997.Bryant, John. A Companion to Melville Studies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.Bryant, John. Melville And Repose : The Rhetoric Of Humor In The American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.Budd, Louis J., and Edwin Harrison Cady. On Melville. The Best from American literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1988.Cahir, Linda Costanzo. Solitude and Society in the Works of Herman Melville and Edith Wharton. Contributions to the study of American literature no. 3. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.Cameron, Sharon, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The Corporeal Self : Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.Canaday, Nicholas. Melville and Authority. University of Florida monographs. Humanities, no. 28. Gainesville,: University of Florida Press, 1968.Charters, Ann. Melville in the Berkshires. Portents ; 13a. S.l.: s.n.,1969.Chase, Richard Volney. Herman Melville, A Critical Study. New York,: Macmillan Co., 1949.Chase, Richard Volney. Melville: A Collection Of Critical Essays. Twentieth century views. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1962.Cowan, Bainard. Exiled Waters : Moby-Dick and the crisis of allegory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.Curl, Vega. Pasteboard Masks; Fact As A Spiritual Symbol In The NovelsOf Hawthorne And Melville. Radcliffe honors theses in English ; no. 2.Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard University Press, 1931.Davis, Clark. After the Whale : Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

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Dillingham, William B. "The Narrator of Moby Dick." English Studies 49(Feb. 1968): 20-29.Dillingham, William B. Melville & His Circle : The Last Years. Athens:University of Georgia Press, 1996.Dimock, Wai-chee. Empire For Liberty : Melville And The Poetics Of Individualism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.Dryden, Edgar A. Melville's Thematics Of Form; The Great Art Of Telling The Truth. Baltimore,: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.Duban, James. Melville's Major Fiction : Politics, Theology, And Imagination. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983.Durer, Christopher S. Herman Melville, Romantic and Prophet: A Study of His Romantic Sensibility and His Relationship to European Romantics. Toronto: York U P, 1996.Eldridge, H. G. "Careful Disorder: The Structure of Moby Dick." American Literature 39 (May 1967): 145-162.Frank, Stuart M., and Herman Melville. Herman Melville's Picture Gallery : Sources And Types Of The "Pictorial" Chapters Of Moby-Dick. Fairhaven, Mass.: E.J. Lefkowicz, 1986.Franklin, H. Bruce. The Wake Of The Gods; Melville's Mythology. Stanford, Calif.,: Stanford University Press, 1963.Gale, Robert L. A Herman Melville Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.Gale, Robert L.. Plots and Characters in the Fiction and Narrative Poetry of Herman Melville. Hamden,Conn.: Archon Books, 1969.Gidmark, Jill B. Melville Sea Dictionary : A Glossed Concordance And Analysis Of The Sea Language In Melville's Nautical Novels. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.Goering, Wynn M. "To Obey Rebelling: The Quaker Dilemma in Moby Dick."The New England Q 54.4 (Dec. 1981): 519-538.Greenberg, Robert M. Splintered Worlds : Fragmentation And The Ideal Of Diversity In The Work Of Emerson, Melville, Whitman, And Dickinson.Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.Grejda, Edward S. The Common Continent of Men: Racial Equality in the Writings of Herman Melville. Port Washington, N.Y., Kennikat P, 1974.Gross, Seymour L. "Hawthorne Versus Melville." Bucknell Review 14 (1966): 89-109.Haberstroh, Charles. Melville and Male Identity. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980.Hamilton, William. Reading Moby-Dick And Other Essays. American university studies. Series IV, English language and literature ; vol. 69. New York: P. Lang, 1989.Hands, Charles B. "The Comic Entrance to Moby-Dick." College Literature 2 (1975): 182-91.

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Hartstein, Arnold M. "Myth and History in Moby Dick." ATQ 57 (July 1985): 31-43.Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Herman Melville, and James Wilson. The HawthorneAnd Melville Friendship : An Annotated Bibliography, Biographical And Critical Essays, And Correspondence Between The Two. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1991.Hayes, Kevin J. The Critical Response To Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Critical responses in arts and letters no. 13. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.Hayes, Kevin J., Hershel Parker, and Steven Mailloux. Checklist of Melville reviews. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991.Hayford, Harrison. "Hawthorne, Melville, and the Sea." New England Quarterly 19 (1946): 435-452.Hayford, Harrison. Dimensions of Moby-Dick. Chicago, Ill.: Newberry Library, 1982.Hayford, Harrison. Melville's "Monody" : Really for Hawthorne? Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990.Herbert, T. Walter. Moby-Dick and Calvinism : A World Dismantled. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1977.Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker. Critical Essays on Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Critical essays on American literature. New YorkToronto: G.K. Hall ;Maxwell Macmillan Canada; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker. Herman Melville : The ContemporaryReviews. The American critical archives ; 6. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.Hillway, Tyrus, Luther S. Mansfield, and Melville Society. Moby-Dick Centennial Essays. Dallas,: Southern Methodist University Press, 1953.Hoeltje, Hubert H. "Hawthorne, Melville, and 'Blackness.' " American Literature 37 (1965): 41-51.Horsford, Howard C. "The Design of the Argument in Moby Dick." Modern Fiction Studies 8 (Aug.1962): 233-251. Hoffman, Daniel. Form and Fablein American fiction. New York,: Oxford University Press, 1961.Howard, Leon, Tom Quirk, and James Barbour. The Unfolding Of Moby-Dick: Essays In Evidence (A Fragment). Glassboro, N.J.: Melville Society, 1987.Howard, Leon. "The Composition of Moby Dick." in Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkeley, 1951.Howard, Leon. Herman Melville, a Biography. Berkeley,: University of California Press, 1951.Jehlen, Myra. Herman Melville : A Collection Of Critical Essays. New century views ; NCV-8. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994.

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Kearns, Michael. "The Material Melville: Shaping Readers' Horizons," in: Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles, eds. Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America. U Mass Press, 1997.Kelley, Wyn. Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York. NY: Cambridge U P, 1996.Kier, Kathleen E. A Melville Encyclopedia : The Novels. 2nd ed. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Pub. Co., 1994.Kring, Walter Donald. Herman Melville's Religious Journey. Raleigh, N.C.: Pentland Press, 1997.Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923.Lee, A. Robert. Herman Melville: Reassessments. Critical studies series.Levin, Harry. The Power Of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville. [1st ]ed. New York,: Knopf, 1958.Levine, Robert S. The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge companions to literature. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Levy, Leo B. "Hawthorne, Melville, and the Monitor." American Literature 37 (1965): 33-40.Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log; A Documentary Life Of Herman Melville, 1819-1891. 1st ed. New York,: Harcourt Brace, 1951.Madison, Mary K. Books on Melville, 1891-1981 : A Checklist. Loose-Fish Books ; no. 1. Evanston, Ill.Hattiesburg, MS: Hayford Associates ;Distributed exclusively by the Melville Society of AmericaDept. of English University of Southern Mississippi, 1982.Mailloux, Steve, and Hershel Parker. Checklist of Melville Reviews. Los Angeles: Melville Society, 1975.Mansfield, Luther S. "Symbolism and Biblical Allusion in Moby Dick." Emerson Society Q 28 (1962): 20-23.Markels, Julian. Melville And The Politics Of Identity : From King Lear To Moby-Dick. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.Martin, Robert K. Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, SocialCritique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986.Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance; Art And Expression In The AgeOf Emerson And Whitman. London, New York etc.: Oxford U P, 1941.Maxwell, Desmond E. S. "The Tragic Phase: Melville and Hawthorne." American Fiction: The Intellectual Background. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963.May, John R. "The Possibility of Renewal: The Ideal and Real in Hawthorne, Melville and Twain." Toward A New Earth: Apocalypse In The American Novel. Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1972. 42-91

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McSweeney, Kerry. Moby-Dick : Ishmael's Mighty Book. Twayne's masterwork studies ; no. 3. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.Melville, Herman, and Lynn Horth. Correspondence. The writings of Herman Melville ; v. 14. Ed. Herman Melville. The Northwestern-Newberry ed. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press ;Newberry Library, 1993.Melville, Herman, Harrison Hayford, and Hershel Parker. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text. A Norton critical edition. [1st ] ed. New York,: W. W. Norton, 1967.Melville, Herman. The Letters Of Herman Melville. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.Miller, James E., Jr. "Hawthorne and Melville: No! in Thunder." QuestsSurd And Absurd: Essays In American Literature. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967. 186-208.Miller, James E., Jr. "Hawthorne and Melville: The Unpardonable Sin." PMLA 70 (1955): 91-114.Miller, James Edwin. A Reader's Guide To Herman Melville. New York,: Farrar Straus and Cudahy, 1962.Miller, Perry. The Raven And The Whale : Poe, Melville, And The New York Literary Scene. Johns Hopkins paperback ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.Mumford, Lewis. Herman Melville. New York,: The Literary guild of America, 1929.Murray, Henry A. "In Nomine Diaboli." The New England Q 24 (Dec. 1951): 435-452.Murray, Henry A., et al. Melville & Hawthorne In The Berkshires: A Symposium. Ed. Howard P.Vincent. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State Univ. Press, 1968.Mushabac, Jane. Melville's Humor : A Critical Study. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981.Myers, Henry Alonzo. "Captain Ahab's Discovery: The Tragic Meaning of Moby Dick." The New England Quarterly 15 (Mar. 1942): 15-34.Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael. San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights Books, 1947.Otter, Samuel. Melville's Anatomies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.Pahl, Dennis. Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989.Parker, Hershel, and Harrison Hayford. Moby-Dick As Doubloon; Essays And Extracts, 1851-1970. Norton critical editions. [1st ] ed. New York,: Norton, 1970.Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville : A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

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Parker, Hershel. The Recognition Of Herman Melville; Selected Criticism Since 1846. Ann Arbor,: University of Michigan Press, 1967.Philbrick, Nat. In the Heart of the Sea : The Tragedy of the WhaleshipEssex. New York: Viking, 2000. Pollin, Burton R. "Traces of Poe in Melville." Melville Society Extracts 109 (June 1997): 2-12.Pommer, Henry Francis. Milton and Melville. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1950.Post-Lauria, Sheila. Correspondent Colorings: Melville and the Marketplace. Amherst: U Mass Press, 1996.Reddick, Marcia. "'Something, Somehow Like Original Sin': Striking theUneven Balance in 'The Town-Ho's Story' and Moby-Dick." ATQ 10.2 (Jun 1996): 81-91.Reising, Russell, and Peter J. Kvidera. "Fast Fish And Raw Fish: Moby-Dick, Japan, And Melville's Thematics of Geography." New England Quarterly 70.2 (Jun 1997): 285-306.Renker, Elizabeth. Strike Through The Mask : Herman Melville And The Scene Of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.Ricks, Beatrice, and Joseph D. Adams. Herman Melville: A Reference Bibliography, 1900-1972, With Selected Nineteenth-Century Materials. Boston,: G. K. Hall, 1973.Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville : A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 1996.Robillard, Douglas. Melville and the Visual Arts : Ionian form, Venetian Tint. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy : The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Knopf, 1983.Rosenberry, Edward H. Melville And The Comic Spirit. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955.Rountree, Thomas J. Critics on Melville. Readings in literary criticism, 12. Coral Gables, Fla.,: University of Miami Press, 1972.Royster, Paul.”Melville’s Economy of Lnaguage” http://works.bepress.com/paul_royster/23/Samson, John. White Lies : Melville's Narratives Of Facts. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989.Sanborn, Geoffrey. The Sign Of The Cannibal : Melville And The Making Of A Postcolonial Reader. New Americanists. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.Scheidau, Herbert N., and Homer B. Pettey. "Melville's Ithyphallic God." Studies In American Fiction 26.2 (Fall 1998): 193-213.Schultz, Elizabeth A. Unpainted To The Last : Moby-Dick And Twentieth-Century American Art. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

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Schultz, Elizabeth. "The Sentimental Subtext of Moby-Dick: Melville's Response to the 'World of Woe'." Esq : A Journal Of The American Renaissance 42.1 (1996): 29-51.Sealts, Merton M, Jr. "Approaching Melville Through 'Hawthorne and HisMosses.' " Emerson Society Quarterly 28.3 (1962): 12-15.Sealts, Merton M. Melville's Reading. Rev. and enl. ed. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.Sealts, Merton M. The Early Lives Of Melville. Madison: U of WisconsinP, 1974.Sedgwick, William Ellery. Herman Melville; The Tragedy Of Mind. New York,: Russell and Russell, 1962.Sewall, Richard B. "Moby Dick as Tragedy." In The Vision of Tragedy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1959.Sherrill, Rowland A. The Prophetic Melville: Experience, Transcendence, and Tragedy. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1979.Shulman, Robert. "The Serious Functions of Melville's Phallic Jokes." American Literature 33 (May 1961): 179-194.Solomon, Pearl C. Dickens And Melville In Their Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1975.Spanos, William V. The Errant Art Of Moby-Dick : The Canon, The Cold War, And The Struggle For American Studies. New Americanists. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.Staud, John J. "Moby Dick and Melville's Vexed Romanticism." American Transcendental Quarterly 6.4 (Dec 1992): 279+.Sten, Christopher. Sounding The Whale : Moby-Dick As Epic Novel. Kent,Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996.Sten, Christopher. The Weaver-God, He Weaves : Melville And The Poetics Of The Novel. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996.Stewart, Randall. "Melville and Hawthorne." South Atlantic Quarterly 51 (1952): 436-446.Stewart, Randall. "The Vision of Evil in Hawthorne and Melville." The Tragic Vision And The Christian Faith. Ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. New York: Association Press, 1957.Szumski, Bonnie. Readings on Herman Melville. The Greenhaven Press Literary Companion To American Authors. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1997.Thomas, Brook. "The Legal Fictions of Herman Melville and Lemuel Shaw." Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 24-51.Thompson, Lawrance Roger. Melville's Quarrel With God. Princeton,: Princeton University Press, 1952.Trimpi, H. P. "Melville's Use of Demonology and Witchcraft in Moby Dick." Journal of History of Ideas 30 (Oct. 1969): 543-62.

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Vincent, Howard Paton. The Merrill Studies in Moby-Dick. Charles E. Merrill program in American literature. Columbus, Ohio,: C. E. MerrillPub. Co., 1969.Vincent, Howard Paton. The Trying-out of Moby-Dick. Boston,: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949.Vogel, Dan. "The Dramatic Chapters in Moby Dick." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 13 (Dec. 1958): 239-247.Waggoner, Hyatt H. "Hawthorne and Melville Against the Reader With Their Abode." Studies In The Novel 2.4 (1970): 420-424.Walcutt, Charles C. "The Fire Symbolism in Moby Dick." Modern LanguageNotes 59 (May 1944):304-310.Ward, J. A.. "The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby Dick." American Literature 28 (May 1956): 164-183.Watson, Charles N., Jr. "The Estrangement of Hawthorne and Melville." New England Quarterly 46 (1973): 380-402.Watters, R. E.. "The Meanings of the White Whale." U of Toronto Q 20 (Jan. 1951): 155-168.Weaver, Raymond M. Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic. New York,: George H. Doran Company, 1921.Wenke, John Paul. Melville's Muse : Literary Creation & The Forms Of Philosophical Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995.Woodson, Thomas. "Ahab's Greatness: Prometheus as Narcissus." English Literary History (Se. 1966): 449-463.Wright, Nathalia. Melville's Use Of The Bible. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1949.Young, James D. "The Nine Gams of the Pequod." American Literature 15 (Jan. 1954): 449-463.Zoellner, Robert. The salt-sea mastodon; a reading of Moby-Dick. Berkeley,: University of California Press, 1973.

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1. Go over syllabus.

Required texts, coursepack, schedule of readings, AngelThursday assignmentHandoutsZ: Delbanco

Question of readingMy virtuesMy flaws

Read evaluations. Handout

Course pack: Melville’s Ellison’s handwriting Compare my editions--commentaryPoems by Harper, Crane.

Melville and Ellison as New Yorkers Melville Customs House Gansevort St Harlem Docks “Henry Melville”Ellison 749 St NicholasHarper poemBeaver intro to BC.

Last night at HIR. Green Pastures Church in honor of King:

Psalms. Shir hamalot ledavid. Hinei ma tov uma naim shevet achim gam yachad

Biblical and the African American: King as a crossing point. But also Melville.

Orme Handout. Read Orme

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January 24th

BC as fragemented, composite text—3 parts narrative, deposition, coda. How many points of view?

Fragmented, mystifying: but also about just these things: fragmented perspective and information and mystification. Form mimics content.

At least, a feedback loop between them.

The tableau of the knot. Allegory on interpretation. Many othertableaux and ritualized scenes. Scenes of encoding, scenes of decoding. 255 knot238 symbolenchantment/seeing; 247, 252BC as “web of history”—not just about its own elements and problems (faced inward), but faced complexly outward: to the question of slavery, of racism, of a polis—the ship as metaphor for nation-state. Spain, America. Ship of state.

What do ships do? Ships sink. And ships sail. Ships move. Ships don’t move Ships carry cargo (whaling), (people as chattel). Ships fight battles. Ships transact commerce. Shipshave hierarchy. Ships are populated.

Fisher, p 77 on space and damage82: work and ritual. Ships as labor. “Work promots, just as ritual blocks, social transparency. Where there is opacity, we find interpretation”Fisher as interpreter: 93

OK, let’s start with what you notice:

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January 29: Fisher and Sundquist—

Operative critical concepts:

Democratic, undamaged social space: 4 concepts: 75-76“representation”: literary/political80: meaning of ship: no family, no agriculture81-82: semblance of work: instead “ritual” blocks, promotes social transparency83” inside/outside—“whispering”84: F’s explanation of monastery: as place88: in advacen, aftermath and resideue of slavery cf Sundquist, 13990: primary opacity of alvery as system with secondary epistemological outcomes91 either/or --inclusive not exclusive Aristotelian vs Fruedian. Negation does not lead to choice93: phenomenology of slavery94: either/or as extended riddle, narratively95: postponed/suspended knowledge “saves”; maintains slvery86: fainting opposed to knowing: not solving riddle97: room of overlapping facts; scene of historical melancholy (98)

Sundquists: historicized reading—slavery as hemispheric, not merely American143, 148 Not just the South/Conferacy but New World144—ritual control—state of suspense—148-149narrator as shadow: readers, too?Minstrelsy155-156: tautology vs either/or—double negatives160 play of barber165 New World SlaveryAshanti culture—163ff Africanism. Muisc179: meaning of deposition

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February 5

Moving from Melville to Ellison:

Gender-relations: Delano’s misreading of African women. A pointed example of Morrison’s argument.

Read the Deposition: women have prob been sexually victimized by both Aranda and D Benito: prob played a role in the revolt

Shaving scene: 263. Babo as artist, author, ironist

“The problem is that few Americans know who and what they really are.” (AM w/O Blacks) 108

Morrison: ghost in the machine (10) choices, not other (8) Black as metaphor/outsider/limit-point

Eliot: precursor figure. Melville. Emerson. Ancestors a nd Relatives (Melnick)Said on filiation and affiliation.

Ellison/Roth at YU

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Newton Arvin on the Structural Difficulties of Moby-Dick

[Newton Arvin (1900–1963) was a notable American critic. Among his works are Hawthorne (1929), Whitman (1938), and Longfellow: His Life and Work (1962). In this extract from his book on Melville, which won a National Book Award, Arvin explores the difficult structure of Moby-Dick, which, he argues, could only have been written by an American.]

To speak of the structure and the texture of Moby Dick is to embark upon a series of paradoxes that are soberly truthful and precise. Few books of its dimensions have owed so much to books that have preceded them, and few have owed so little; not many imaginative works have so strong and strict a unity, and not manyare composed of such various and even discordant materials; few great novels have been comparably concrete, factual, and prosaic,and few of course have been so large and comprehensive in their generality, so poetic both in their surface fabric and in their central nature. In form alone Moby Dick is unique in its period, and that too in a sense more special than the sense in which every fully achieved work of literature is unique. Such a book could only have been written byan American, and an American of Melville's generation, working ashe did in a kind of isolation from the central current of European writing in his time—an isolation quite consistent with his keeping abreast of it intellectually—and, while losing something in consequence, gaining something indispensable he could not otherwise have had.

Given his kind of creative power, Melville was wholly fortunate in his literary derivations and development. As we have seen, hisspringboard had never been the English or European novel, not at any rate in its great characteristic mode, the mode of the socialnovel, the novel of manners, the novel of "real life." He belonged to a society that was in some of its aspects too archaicto find a natural place for forms so advanced as these, in his own origins, as if he belonged to the Bronze Age or at least to the Age of Migrations, were partly in oral story-telling, the story-telling of sailors and travelers, and partly in forms that

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were either subliterary or at the best on a modestly and hesitantly literary level. He had begun as a writer of reportorial travel books, books that were simply further examplesof the "journal" or "narrative," and in a certain sense he continued to be such a writer in Moby Dick. It is wholly natural that Owen Chase's Narrative should have been so vital to him, andthat one pole of Moby Dick should be constituted by the informative chapters on whales and whaling. Meiville's need as anartist was to take the small, prosy, and terribly circumscribed form he had inherited, and somehow make it a vehicle capable of bearing a great imaginative weight, of expressing great visionarytheme. His problem was to find the bridge between J. Ross Browne and Camoëns. He had quite failed to find it in Mardi; he had run away from his true matter in pursuit of an allegorical will-o'-the-wisp, and the result had been fiasco. A better wisdom had come to him in consequence; a better sense of his own right path.His own right path was, as Emerson would say, to "ask the fact for the form": to remain faithful to his own crass, coarse, unideal, and yet grandiose material—the life of American whalers—and to make of its unpromising images his symbols, of its hardly malleable substance his myth.

It is what he does in Moby Dick. There is no question here of chimerical priests and maidens, of symbolic blooms and allegorical isles and Spenserian bowers; no question of symbols wilfully imposed upon the meaning from without; no question of what Melville himself now calls "a hideous and intolerable allegory." In their stead one finds a fable almost bare in its simplicity and, on the surface, journalistic in its realism; the fable of a whaling vessel that sets out from Nantucket and, like some actual whaling vessels, comes to a disastrous end on the cruising-grounds near the Line. This tale is launched in pages sohomely in their substance, despite their intensity of expression,that its earliest readers might almost have doubted whether they had to do with a "novel" or only with another and rather more dashing "narrative." It comes to a close in pages in which we arestill encountering men like the bereaved Captain Gardiner and thevessels like the Rachel of Nantucket. The skipper and the mates of the Pequod hail from Nantucket or the Cape or the Vineyard;

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all the characters, including the pagan harpooners, and even perhaps the Parsees, are such men as might have been found, though some of them rarely, on an actual whaler of the 'forties. In their company we sail over well-known whaling routes, past familiar capes and headlands, giving chase not to fabulous monsters but to Sperm Whales and Right Whales of the sort that men had taken by the thousands, and having glimpses as we do so of other creatures—sharks, squid, swordfish, seahawks—such as Owen and Cuvier had classified. In short, with one or two great exceptions, the substance of Moby Dick is as faithful to sober fact as that of Owen Chase's or Ross Browne's book; if the impress on the imagination is that of a high poetic form it is not because the poetry is "allegorically" imposed on the stuff, but because the stuff is allowed to render up its own poetic essences.

It does so partly because the organizing structure of the fable—the Voyage, with its clear beginning and its predestined catastrophe—is at once so firm and simple and so large and free in its elasticity: like the structure of the Odyssey or the Lusiads, it is both strict and pliable. It is a fable, moreover, which, though it took shape in the most natural way out of a set of dense facts and tough, unromantic conditions, could nevertheless be made concrete and dramatic through a group of basic, primary symbols (the sea, the quest, the great "fish," theship, the watery tomb) and of incidental or secondary symbols (the sword-mat, the monkey-rope, the sharks, and others) that areboth immediate and primordial, both local and archetypal, both journalistic and mythopoeic. They are, moreover, at the same timewonderfully various and powerfully interrelated, so that the balance, as Coleridge would say, between "sameness" and "difference" is all but perfect. In any composition less completely integrated there might seem to be a hopeless incongruity between Ahab's pipe and the mystic Spirit-Spout, as between the jolly, unimaginative Stubb and the Satanic Fedallah: in the setting of Moby Dick they are no more incongruous than, inthe Odyssey, the swine of Eumaeus and the magic veil that Ino bestows on Odysseus.

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—Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950), pp. 151–54R. W. B. Lewis on language in Moby-Dick

[R. W. B. Lewis (b. 1917) is a distinguished American critic and biographer. He has written The Poetry of Hart Crane (1967), EdithWharton: A Biography (1975), and other volumes. In this extract, Lewis traces the use of a particularly American type of hero, which he calls the American Adam, in the "Try-Works" chapter of Moby-Dick.]

“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp -- all others but liars! Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hidesnot the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which istwo thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hathmore of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true --not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. 'All is vanity'. ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals andjails, and walks fast crossing grave- yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; -- not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon. But even Solomon, he says, 'the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain' (i. e. even while living) 'in the congregation of the dead'. Give not thyself up, then, to

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fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” “The Try-Works,” p328

We may begin with a passage from chapter 96 in Moby-Dick, "The Try-Works"—taking the passage as a summary of Melville's attitudeto innocence and evil; as an example of Melville's way with the material (attitudes, tropes, language) available to him; and as aguide for the rest of this chapter.

The incident of "The Try-Works" will be recalled. Ishmael falls asleep at the tiller one midnight, as the "Pequod" is passing through the Java seas heading northward toward the haunts of the great sperm whales. Waking up, but not yet aware that he has beenasleep, Ishmael finds himself staring into the mouth of hell: "a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness," an infernal scene through which giant shadow-shapes like devils are moving about some dreadful work. He is "horribly conscious of something fatally wrong"; ''a stark bewildered feeling as of death" comes over him. Then he realizes—just in time to swing about, grasp the tiller, and save the ship from capsizing—that hehas turned in his sleep and is facing the two furnaces, or "try-pots," amidships, and the three black harpooners stoking the masses of whale blubber from which the oil is extracted ("tryed-out"). < . . .>

Melville, that is to say, had penetrated beyond both innocence and despair to some glimmering of a moral order which might explain and order them both, though his vision remained slender, as of that moment, and the center of light not yet known, but only believed in—and still ambiguously, at that. But, like the elder Henry James, Melville had moved toward moral insight as faras he had just because he had begun to look at experience

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dramatically. He had begun to discover its plot; and Melville understood the nature of plot, plot in general, better than anyone else in his generation. For Melville was a poet.

So "alternative" is a misleading word, in speaking of any characteristic passage in Melville. Indeed, one way to grasp thispassage and Melville's achievement in general is to notice that Melville is not posing static alternatives but tracing a rhythmicprogression in experience and matching the rhythm as best he can in language. This is the way of a Platonist, and not of a polemicist; much more, it is the way of a poet. We still tend, for all the good criticism of our time, to read a poem the way wewatch a tennis-match: turning our heads and minds back and forth between what we presume to be unchanging opponents, as though a poem moved between fixed choices of attitude before plumping conclusively for one of them as the unequivocal winner. The best kind of poem is a process of generation—in which one attitude or metaphor, subjected to intense pressure, gives symbolic birth to the next, which reveals the color of its origin even as it gives way in turn by "dying into" its successor. Such a poem does not deal with dichotomies but in live sequences.

—R. W. B. Lewis, "Melville: The Apotheosis of Adam," The AmericanAdam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 130–31, 133–34

Warner Berthoff on Melville's Narrators

[Warner Berthoff (b. 1925) is a retired professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Edmund Wilson (1968) and Hart Crane: A Reintroduction (1989). In this extract from The Example of Melville (1962), Berthoff studies the function of the narrator in Melville's works, specifically Moby-Dick.]

The Melvillean narrator acts and is acted upon, being a characterin his own recital. (Indeed in the five books before Moby-

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Dick there are scarcely any other developed characters; there areonly sketches, types, more or less distinctive examples of the conditions of life being described.) But more especially he tells—recalls, considers, meditates, emphasizes, explains. He acts, that is, primarily in his formal role, coming to life through hisown narrative voice. A certain degree of absorbed passivity and reflective detachment marks off the Melvillean narrator from the Romantic hero of passion and energy or from the type of the quester after experience. His character, as recording witness, isto remain radically open to experience without being radically changed by it; he is to identify and judge matters without equivocation, yet not show himself too overridingly anxious to impose his outlook upon them. In this respect the part he plays goes according to the arch-Romantic conception of the poet or artist—the conception of the creative intelligence as the agent of a "negative capability," the source of whose power is in the free and sympathetic readiness of its responses to the phenomena of life. Thus, the role given the narrator in Melville's chronicles is determined, we may say, not only by the situation and actions being rendered but by the very job of rendering them.Certainly Melville used his narrators to convey his own thought and feeling; what should be emphasized is that he was at the sametime, subjecting his reckless personal bent toward declamatory self-expression to the formal discipline of a naturally suitable working method.

This reserved freedom of response in Melville's narrators, and the corresponding rhythm of their absorption and detachment, is what sets them apart as moral agents in his fiction. They are notmade to claim any greater power over their lives' conditions thanis granted any one else. The intuition that "to treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes" applies to them as well. Yet there is a difference, which shows first in the simple mechanics of the first-person mode as Melville used it. Though the narrator will speak of his own behavior deterministically andsee himself at any given moment fate-dogged and nearly powerless,the very fact that he is not only describing the events of the narrative from another point in time but taking just as much timeas he needs and wants in order to recall them makes for a certain

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actual freedom from them and equanimity about them. The business of retrospective narration presumes, and creates, its own detachment, its own independence, its own (as we like to say of Ishmael and his admirable breed) "survival." So Ishmael's qualities—his unflagging readiness, bluff stoicism, impartial mockery, sensuous sympathy, and intellectual vivacity, all maintained in the face of the most fearful omens, and strongly counterpointing Ahab's madness—do not make their impression on usin the book as a dramatic model and triumph of exemplary character. What they do directly refer us to is just that art of which they are the means and the first effects, the convention-rooted art by which the book as we have it has been created. The rare congeniality of the narrator (i.e., of his voice) marks, formally, the creative fulfillment of the narrative genre Melville had steadily been working in, and is the first sign of his mastery in Moby-Dick.

Melville had an impressive flair, as a writer, for direct, unmediated assertion, but when he attempted to make it the whole basis and instrument of his exposition, as in Pierre, it could gooutrageously to waste. In Moby-Dick, on the other hand, the plainprocedures of narrative recollection, the tangible gathering up of past events into the present sequences of a recital, are the means, practically, of his success; through them the most prodigious and terrific phenomena are subdued to the masterable logic of human time and human understanding. All other charactersin the book exist only within the action of the story, and are wholly subject, as we see them, to its course of happenings. The narrator, however, exists to tell the whole story out, and therefore moves above it and around it, as well as through it, inrelative freedom. The result is that the leading gestures of the work as a whole, and the pattern of the experience displayed in it, are never quite the same as what its staged events add up to—or would add up to if presented dramatically only. At least a double focus is established; we see things as they are in the immediate passion of human effort, but also as they appear to detached observation in the mere succession of their occurrence.

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—Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 120–22

Leo Bersani on the Pequod as a Metaphor for America

[Leo Bersani, a professor of French at the University of California at Berkeley, is a distinguished critic and author of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art (1965), A Future for Astyanax (1976), The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986), and other volumes. In this extract, Bersani ponders the degree to which the crew of the Pequod can be considered a metaphor for a racially and culturally diverse America.]

Is the Pequod, to the extent that it functions outside Ahab's domination, the image of an authentically democratic work society? Perhaps—but the workforce is constituted by a hybrid collection of exiles and outcasts. Not only does the biblical name by which the narrator invites the reader to address him in the novel's first line resonate such connotations; the latter aptly describe the crew of the Pequod. Ishmael's emphasis on all the countries and races represented on the ship invites us to seethe crew as a kind of international fraternity of men united in harmonious and useful work. But there is an equally strong emphasis on the wild, untutored, asocial nature of the men in that fraternity. "They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but also each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own." It is, as Starbuck says, "a heathen crew .. . whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea," a crew, as Ishmael puts it, "chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals.'' Indeed whalers in general are "floating outlaws," manned by "unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth."

Ishmael himself must be thought of as belonging to that group; heis its expression. He is so casual in his dismissals of ordinary assumptions about social bonds that we may easily miss his readiness to reject the values of the land. "For my part," he

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announces in chapter one, "I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever." In context, this is playfully perverse hyperbole; but it also belongs to what amounts to a systematic rejection of the civilized ethics of a democratic and Christian land society.

Honorable respectable toils are abominated; the chapter on the Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish is a Swiftean mockery of legal systems in which rights to ownership are often identical to the brute force necessary to claim possession; and Christianity itself is implicitly dismissed in the comparison of images of physical "robustness" in art ("in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic") to "the soft, curled hermaphroditical Italian pictures" of Christ, which ''hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, formthe peculiar practical virtues of his teachings." The Pequod is not, however, a reconstitution of politics, morality, or religious beliefs on some presumably more natural basis. Queequeg's religion is as unsatisfactory as Christianity, and Ishmael's infinite tolerance, far from being grounded in a faith where tolerance is preached as a virtue, merely expresses his unwillingness to be intolerant in the name of any faith whatsoever. Nor is Ishmael willing to swear allegiance to the Pequod's society of savages as a type of social organization. "I myself am a savage, owning to no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him."

Is the Pequod an image of America? It is the settlement of America reenacted, but uncompromisingly radicalized. The "unaccountable odds and ends" from all over the world who ended up in America were of course not only castaways and cannibals; nor were they all, for that matter, unaccountable. But by insisting on the Pequod's nearly total break with the land and the past, Melville simultaneously evokes the origins of America as a house for exiles from everywhere and makes those origins absolute. That is, he evokes the possibility of exile as a whollynew beginning and brutally deprives it of the comforting notion

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of loss. There is no dream that has been frustrated, no second chance for forms of life imagined, but then blocked in their realization, somewhere else. The sea is wildness and anarchy; it opposes to both Ahab's despotism and the democratic vision a kindof social suicide. Thus Melville's novel dreams metaphorically ofthat absolute break with Europe which of course never took place,of a risky willingness to "come to America" with no social visionat all, with nothing but an anxious need to die to society and tohistory. Far from fulfilling a European dream, America would therefore have to be invented by those "thousands upon thousands of mortal men" who at first wanted nothing more than to flee fromthe land but who, having joined the crew of exiles and renegades from all over the hated world, now find themselves suspended in their dying and are obliged to redefine the social itself.

I have argued that, principally through Ahab Moby-Dick dramatizesthe oxymoronic impasse of democracy: the great man's despotism realizes the democratic dream of equality. But Moby-Dick also reinvents that politically infernal rhetoric as a political promise: it dreams a society owing nothing whatsoever to known social ideas. What this society after social death might actuallybe, we can say no more than Melville (or Ishmael) himself can. What can be said is only what has already been said, and Ishmael's way of coercing all that used speech into unimagined significances is to withdraw humorously from nearly all his propositions. He can say what he means only by refusing to mean what he says. America's history will take place in the space at once cluttered and blank where all imaginable social bonds have been simultaneously figured and dissolved. Melville's America is a historical meta-oxymoron: it defeats the defeating oxymoron of a democracy ruined by the fulfillment of its own promise by erasing all promises in order to make the wholly unauthorized promise of an absolutely new society.

—Leo Bersani, "Incomparable America," The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 148–50

James Duban on American Expansionism and Whaling in Moby-Dick

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[James Duban (b. 1951) is a professor of English at the University of Texas. In this extract from Melville's Major Fiction (1983), Duban traces the parallel between whaling and early American expansionism.]

The exact source, if any, of Melville's parallel between whaling and expansionism, is, then, less important than the currency of an idea that provides ample precedent for Ishmael's Prentiss-likedecree that Nantucket whalers have "overrun and conquered that watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. . . . Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; . . . two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his;he owns it, as Emperors own empires." Here, though, Ishmael exhibits enthusiasm of the sort that led the Democratic Review toadvise that "we may . . . be taking a great deal for granted, in discussing the consequences of extending our territorial limits further to the westward than the boundaries of Texas, and to be unmindful of Mrs. Glass's instructions in cooking a fish—first catch it." Suggestive for its related political emphasis is an article in the American Whig Review titled "Our Adventures in Search of a Cat Fish—with . . . Directions how Not to Cook One when Caught." Catching and cooking Texas was not all that difficult; but barbecuing Mexico in its aftermath proved more exhausting: ''Waste not your precious time in taking cats, but iftaken, dream not of barbecuing them, but return them unsigned to the stream, and so shall a great waste of time and patience be spared."

Melville's Ahab stands to learn much the same lesson insofar as his career echoes that of the biblical King Ahab, whose criminality in stealing Naboth's Vineyard (1 Kings 21) was, as Alan Heimert shows, often cited in the nineteenth century to denounce American expansionism in the Southwest. "Arguments . . .addressed to our national cupidity and pride," warned one congressman debating the annexation of Texas, "are the arguments with which Ahab reconciled to himself the seizing of Naboth's Vineyard." Granted, the seemingly unrelated exasperation of losing a limb instigates the mischief of

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Melville's Ahab. Melville, however, may have known how President Polk legitimized America's claims upon Texas by arguing that the Louisiana Purchase (1803) had given the United States absolute title to this land but that John Quincy Adams had foolishly "dismembered" the territory from the Union by ceding it to Spain as part of the Florida Treaty of 1819. Polk, therefore, often spoke less in terms of "annexation" than he did of "reannexation.'' Several U.S. senators even supported a resolution stating that "the country dismembered from the United States by the treaty of 1819 . . . OUGHT TO BE reunited to the United States." But in a rebuttal that possibly imbues with political overtones Ahab's vow to "dismember my dismemberer," Senator Thomas Hart Benton presented a lengthy review of the Texas issue, finally lauding the prudence of Andrew Jackson, who,"in seeking to recover the dismembered part of our own country . . . did not undertake to dismember the empire of a neighbor." And Melville may well have consulted the 1844 volume of the Congressional Globe that includes this passage, for it also contains an account of the stump speech in which Melville's brother, Gansevoort, coined the name "Young Hickory" for James K.Polk.

The expansionist nature of Ahab's quest also gives added significance to both "the sleeplessness of his vow" and to the fact that "even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock." Ahab either paces thedeck, "always wakeful" and mindful of his purpose, or he reclinesat his charts with his head thrown back, as if he were reading the telltale, which, suspended from the ceiling, helps guide him to Moby-Dick. As Starbuck says, "[S]leeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose." Ahab's, in short, is an "unsleeping, ever-pacing thought," which finds an analog in the Foreign Quarterly Review's criticism of both the "restless and reckless race" of American pioneers and "the American passion forgoing a-head, and keeping in perpetual motion." To this charge the New York Herald responded, insisting that Europe was merely intimidated by America's crusade to widen the area of liberty: "[I]t is this very 'restlessness' that alarms the despotisms of

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the ancient world—a 'restlessness' to which steam, the railroad, the electric telegraph . . . give such vastly increased impetus and power. . . ." And Ahab's restlessness approaches this precisevariety of continentalism: "The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron nails."

--James Duban, Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), pp. 87–89

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February 28

Porter and

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