Melville and the Question of Meaning

Melville and the Question of Meaning PDF Author: David Faflik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351110810
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
This rich volume of essays restores meaning itself as the focal point of one of our most thoughtful modern writers, Herman Melville. Melville and the Question of Meaning thinks about thinking in Melville. For if Melville’s concerns with interpretation (the contributors to one recent collection variously read the author for "the ‘meaning’ of the characters," the "meaning" of the "body," "recesses of meaning," "deepest levels of meaning," "double meaning," and the "meaning" of "being" and "everything else") overlap with our own concerns, at a cultural moment when meaning feels especially strained, we have lost sight of the central place of meaning making in Melville’s work. My own readings in Melville are a pedestrian’s guide through the self-conscious complications of meaning we meet with in Melville across a range of different disciplines and endeavors. Combining aesthetics and sociolinguistics, history and theory, rhetoric and politics, philosophy and film studies, Melville and the Question of Meaning demonstrates that the project of making meaning in Melville remains as vital as ever.

Melville and the Question of Meaning

Melville and the Question of Meaning PDF Author: David Faflik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351110810
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
This rich volume of essays restores meaning itself as the focal point of one of our most thoughtful modern writers, Herman Melville. Melville and the Question of Meaning thinks about thinking in Melville. For if Melville’s concerns with interpretation (the contributors to one recent collection variously read the author for "the ‘meaning’ of the characters," the "meaning" of the "body," "recesses of meaning," "deepest levels of meaning," "double meaning," and the "meaning" of "being" and "everything else") overlap with our own concerns, at a cultural moment when meaning feels especially strained, we have lost sight of the central place of meaning making in Melville’s work. My own readings in Melville are a pedestrian’s guide through the self-conscious complications of meaning we meet with in Melville across a range of different disciplines and endeavors. Combining aesthetics and sociolinguistics, history and theory, rhetoric and politics, philosophy and film studies, Melville and the Question of Meaning demonstrates that the project of making meaning in Melville remains as vital as ever.

Why Read Moby-Dick?

Why Read Moby-Dick? PDF Author: Nathaniel Philbrick
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Get Book Here

Book Description
A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review

Tortured Synthesis; the Meaning of Melville's Clarel

Tortured Synthesis; the Meaning of Melville's Clarel PDF Author: Joseph G. Knapp
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

Book Description


Herman Melville; the Philosophical Implications of Literary Technique in Moby Dick

Herman Melville; the Philosophical Implications of Literary Technique in Moby Dick PDF Author: John Borton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 48

Get Book Here

Book Description


A New Companion to Herman Melville

A New Companion to Herman Melville PDF Author: Wyn Kelley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119668506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 596

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Visionary of the Word

Visionary of the Word PDF Author: Brian Yothers
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810134276
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book Here

Book Description
Visionary of the Word brings together the latest scholarship on Herman Melville’s treatment of religion across his long career as a writer of fiction and poetry. The volume suggests the broad range of Melville’s religious concerns, including his engagement with the denominational divisions of American Christianity, his dialogue with transatlantic currents in nineteenth-century religious thought, his consideration of theological and philosophical questions related to the problem of evil and determinism versus free will, and his representation of the global contact among differing faiths and cultures. These essays constitute a capacious response to the many avenues through which Melville interacted with religious faith, doubt, and secularization throughout his career, advancing our understanding of Melville as a visionary interpreter of religious experience who remains resonant in our own religiously complex era.

Meanings of the White Whale (Herman Melville: Moby Dick)

Meanings of the White Whale (Herman Melville: Moby Dick) PDF Author: Silja Rübsamen
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638507440
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 16

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essay from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: A, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth (English Department), course: English 391 Honors: New England and the Sea, language: English, abstract: Throughout the whole novel Melville undertook great pains to provide a vast network of associations in order to amplify the image of the whale for the reader. A glance at Melville’s sources proves that he had amassed a collection of general and mythological accounts of the whale even before he began to write Moby-Dick. Becoming ever more aware of the multiplicity of possible interpretations of the whale, Melville admitted in Chapter 104 that the main theme of the book is a “mighty theme,” brought to perfection in a “mighty book” (p. 349). Every description of a different concept of the White Whale from any culture brings with it a vast body of pictures and notions, each able to incite a reaction of associations within the reader; the result being necessarily a wide range of different meanings – almost one meaning for every reader. Cloaked in different accounts of the White Whale comes an amplification process. The reader is confronted with concepts of the Whale and his whiteness, each accompanied with a series of possible associations that finally give the White Whale its immeasurable plurality of meaning. That Melville’s narrator had undoubtedly more than one meaning in mind for the whale tells Ch. 1: And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. (p. 20) The notion that everybody sees something different in a mirror elucidates the amplification process the narrator has in store for the reader. Just as a mirror, the novel serves as an instrument of self-assessment: the reader looks into the book, and combines personal background with the “raw material” of concepts that enable him to develop his associations that finally form his image of the whale. [...]

Melville among the Philosophers

Melville among the Philosophers PDF Author: Corey McCall
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498536751
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
For more than a century readers have found Herman Melville’s writing rich with philosophical ideas, yet there has been relatively little written about what, exactly, is philosophically significant about his work and why philosophers are so attracted to Melville in particular. This volume addresses this silence through a series of essays that: (1) examine various philosophical contexts for Melville’s work, (2) take seriously Melville’s writings as philosophy, and (3) consider how modern philosophers have used Melville and the implications of appropriating Melville for contemporary thought. Melville among the Philosophers is ultimately an intervention across literary studies and philosophy that carves new paths into the work of one of America’s most celebrated authors, a man who continues to enchant and challenge readers well into the twenty-first century.

God's Will

God's Will PDF Author: J. I. Packer
Publisher: Baker Books
ISBN: 1441235922
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Seeking God's guidance is a focus for many believers. We want to know what God has planned for our lives. Are we making the right decision? Are we in his will? For some people, knowing God is guiding their lives makes them relax and enjoy the ride. But others fear making the wrong choice and find themselves paralyzed as they wait for signs from above. J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom answer these fears with God's Will. With solid biblical footing, they shed light on the notion of God's guidance in response to the many misunderstandings well-meaning Christians can have. Readers seeking God's will in major life decisions, as well as anyone interested in understanding how God guides us, will welcome this practical and inspiring book.

The Confidence-Man

The Confidence-Man PDF Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1775419924
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Get Book Here

Book Description
The name Herman Melville is synonymous with the pinnacle of American literary achievement, and many regard his novel Moby-Dick as the quintessential work of American fiction. In The Confidence-Man, Melville's final major novel, the author explores the motivations, travails, and personalities of a group of boat passengers en route to New Orleans, as well as the mysterious trickster figure who riles things up at the margins of the group.