Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman

Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman PDF Author: Michael Jonik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108420923
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
An ambitious, revisionary study of not only Herman Melville's political philosophy, but also of our own deeply inhuman condition.

Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman

Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman PDF Author: Michael Jonik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108420923
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
An ambitious, revisionary study of not only Herman Melville's political philosophy, but also of our own deeply inhuman condition.

Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman

Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman PDF Author: Michael Jonik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108369049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
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

Herman Melville PDF Author: Corey Evan Thompson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476676321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Jennifer Greiman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503634329
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
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.

Ahab Unbound

Ahab Unbound PDF Author: Meredith Farmer
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452961093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
Why Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear—and our compassion Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human. Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work. Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar Martínez Benedí, U of L’Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John’s College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192871722
Category : Aesthetics in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs retraces Melville's engagement with beauty and provides a revisionary account of Melville's philosophy, aesthetics, and literary career.

The Inhuman Race

The Inhuman Race PDF Author: Leonard Cassuto
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231103367
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In revealing the source of the ideology of whiteness in the imagination, Cassuto turns to images of blackness in American literature and culture from 1622 to 1865, examining such texts as Swallow Barn, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Typee, and Moby Dick.

The New Melville Studies

The New Melville Studies PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484034
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This collection reimagines Melville as both a theorist and a writer, approaching his works as philosophical forms in their own right.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics PDF Author: John D. Kerkering
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108841899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This volume addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. It shows how a variety of literary genres and forms, such as poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction, engaged with political questions and participated in political debate.

The Prosthetic Imagination

The Prosthetic Imagination PDF Author: Peter Boxall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108872646
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.