Melville among the Philosophers

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

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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.

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.

One Foot in the Finite

One Foot in the Finite PDF Author: K. L. Evans
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810136147
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
One Foot in the Finite inspires a radical shift in our view of Melville’s project in Moby-Dick, for its guiding notion is that Melville uses his book to call into question the naturalism that distinguishes the early modern period in Europe. Naturalism is not only the idea that reality is exhausted by nature, or that there exists a domain of physical entities subject to autonomous laws and unaffected by human ingenuity; it also implies a counterpart, a world of pretense and deception, a domain of mental entities ontologically distinct from physical entities and therefore constituting a different realm. To naturalists, whales are part of the background of existing objects against which man assembles his various, subjective, rather arbitrary interpretations. But in Moby-Dick Melville casts upon the world a more ingenious eye, one free of the dualist veil. He confronts a basic misconception: that the contents of consciousness comprise a different order from physical life. He rubs out the dividing line modernity has drawn between the human world of names or concepts and the nonhuman world of plants, creatures, geological features, and natural forces. Melville’s philosophizing, carried by fiction, has dramatic consequence. It overturns our view of language as a system of mental representations that might turn out to represent falsely.

Melville’s Philosophies

Melville’s Philosophies PDF Author: Branka Arsic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501321021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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

Philosophy Beside Itself

Philosophy Beside Itself PDF Author: Stephen W. Melville
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719019203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"Philosophy Beside Itself " was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests. Stephen Melville's aim in "Philosophy Beside Itself " is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline. Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's "Blindness and Insight "and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism--radical self-criticism--is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement. Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Melville’s Philosophies

Melville’s Philosophies PDF Author: Branka Arsic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150132103X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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

Melville's Art of Democracy

Melville's Art of Democracy PDF Author: Nancy Fredricks
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820316826
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This challenging and timely study demonstrates that the problems Melville faced as a writer - the relationship between politics and aesthetics and the representation of the marginalized without appropriation - are similar to issues faced in the academy today.

Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice PDF Author: Ian Marsh
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415333009
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This practical new text encourages students to develop a deeper understanding of the current context and workings of the criminal justice system, and is of particular use for students and for practitioners in the criminal justice arena.

Seams

Seams PDF Author: Stephen Melville
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134392583
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe brings to Melville's work the insight not only of an art critic and theorist, but of a practicing artist as well. Navigating through the complexity of contemporary thought and philosophy, Gilbert-Rolfe unravels the Gordian knot of the diverse discourses that circumscribe Melville's views, revealing the practicality and clarity of Melville's speculative narratives. Stephen Melville is one of the most thoughtful critics to emerge in recent years. He has applied the tools developed by Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan to the problems of contemporary art. With his roots in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, he reopens questions of art's reception, interpretation, and commentary. Not only does he articulate the limitations of these categories, and how they are set into motion-stasis and balance are not the goal. He demonstrates how the territory of each of these discourses is maintained by their relationship to one another. Melville's texts not only represent the complexity of his subjec

Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others

Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others PDF Author: Edward F. Mooney
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501357727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Edward F. Mooney takes us into the lived philosophies of Melville, Kierkegaard, Henry Bugbee, and others who write deeply in ways that bring philosophy and religion into the fabric of daily life, in its simplicities, crises, and moments of communion and joy. Along the way Mooney explores meditations on wilderness, on the enigma of self-deception, the role of maternal love and the pain of separations, and the pervasiveness of “difficult reality” where valuable things are presented to us under two (or more) aspects at once.

Melville and the Idea of Blackness

Melville and the Idea of Blackness PDF Author: Christopher Freeburg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139536729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
By examining the unique problems that 'blackness' signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, 'Benito Cereno' and 'The Encantadas', Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville's critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, Freeburg asserts that blackness functions as the site where Melville correlates the sociopolitical challenges of transatlantic slavery and US colonial expansion with philosophical concerns about mastery. By focusing on Melville's iconic interracial encounters, Freeburg reveals the important role blackness plays in Melville's portrayal of characters' arduous attempts to seize their own destiny, amass scientific knowledge and perfect themselves. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American and postcolonial studies.