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Author: Jonathan A. Cook
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501770985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Shedding new light on both classic and lesser-known works in the Melville canon with particular attention to the author's literary use of the Bible, Neither Believer Nor Infidel examines the debate between religious skepticism and Christian faith that infused Herman Melville's writings following Moby-Dick. Jonathan A. Cook's study is the first to focus on the decisive role of faith and doubt in Melville's writings following his mid-career turn to shorter fiction, and still later to poetry, as a result of the commercial failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre. Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed that Melville "can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief," a remark that encapsulates an essential truth about Melville's attitude to Christianity. Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Melville spent his literary career poised between an intellectual rejection of Christian dogma and an emotional attachment to the consolations of non-dogmatic Christian faith. Accompanying this ambivalence was a lifelong devotion to the text of the King James Bible as both moral sourcebook and literary template. Following a biographical overview of skeptical influences and manifestations in Melville's early life and career, Cook examines the evidence of religious doubt and belief in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!," "The Encantadas," Israel Potter, Battle-Pieces, Timoleon, and Billy Budd. Accessible for both the general reader and the scholar, Neither Believer Nor Infidel clarifies the ambiguities of Melville's pervasive use of religion in his fiction and poetry. In analyzing Melville's persistent oscillation between metaphysical rebellion and attenuated belief, Cook elucidates both well-known and under-appreciated works.
Author: Jonathan A. Cook
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501770985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Shedding new light on both classic and lesser-known works in the Melville canon with particular attention to the author's literary use of the Bible, Neither Believer Nor Infidel examines the debate between religious skepticism and Christian faith that infused Herman Melville's writings following Moby-Dick. Jonathan A. Cook's study is the first to focus on the decisive role of faith and doubt in Melville's writings following his mid-career turn to shorter fiction, and still later to poetry, as a result of the commercial failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre. Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed that Melville "can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief," a remark that encapsulates an essential truth about Melville's attitude to Christianity. Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Melville spent his literary career poised between an intellectual rejection of Christian dogma and an emotional attachment to the consolations of non-dogmatic Christian faith. Accompanying this ambivalence was a lifelong devotion to the text of the King James Bible as both moral sourcebook and literary template. Following a biographical overview of skeptical influences and manifestations in Melville's early life and career, Cook examines the evidence of religious doubt and belief in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!," "The Encantadas," Israel Potter, Battle-Pieces, Timoleon, and Billy Budd. Accessible for both the general reader and the scholar, Neither Believer Nor Infidel clarifies the ambiguities of Melville's pervasive use of religion in his fiction and poetry. In analyzing Melville's persistent oscillation between metaphysical rebellion and attenuated belief, Cook elucidates both well-known and under-appreciated works.
Author: Dennis Patrick Slattery
Publisher: Fisher King Press
ISBN: 1771690291
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
Our Daily Breach: Exploring Your Personal Myth Through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dickoffers both a way of understanding what has generally been called the greatest novel of the American myth while simultaneously exploring one’s own personal myth. Its added feature is that it is an interactive book in allowing reader’s to meditate on one question per page for each day of the year and to undercover many facets of one’s personal myth through cursive writing. It has been long understood that classics of literature are their own form of therapy in that they frequently tap into some of the most shared concerns of being human. This book makes such a connection between our interior life and the plot of the story through the power of mythopoiesis, namely the imaginative act of giving a formative shape to the myth we are each living in and out through the power of analogy, correspondence or accord with the classic poem. Using Melville’s epic of America, the reader may enter the deepest seas of his/her own mythic waters to realize and give language to the myth that resides in our daily plot line.
Author: Daniel Herman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 161146157X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
In Moby-Dick’s wide philosophical musings and central narrative arch, Herman finds a philosophy very closely aligned specifically with the original teachings of Zen Buddhism. In exploring the likelihood of this hitherto undiscovered influence, Herman looks at works Melville is either known to have read or that there is a strong likelihood of his having come across, as well as offering a more expansive consideration of Moby-Dick from a Zen Buddhist perspective, as it is expressed in both ancient and modern teachings. But not only does the book delve deeply into one of the few aspects of Moby-Dick’s construction left unexplored by scholars, it also conceives of an entirely new way of reading the greatest of American books—offering critical re-considerations of many of its most crucial and contentious issues, while focusing on what Melville has to teach us about coping with adversity, respecting ideological diversity, and living skillfully in a fickle, slippery world.
Author: Geoffrey Sanborn
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822321187
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
By exploring cannibalism in the work of Herman Melville, Sanborn argues that Melville produced a postcolonial perspective even as nations were building colonial empires.
Author: Lawrence L. Langer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666918776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
The three works considered in Hierarchy and Mutuality in Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov display a striking overlap in their concern with hierarchy and mutuality as parallel and often intersecting way of how human beings relate to each other and to divine forces in the universe. All three contain adversarial protagonists whose stature often commands admiration from audiences less ready to confront their motives and deeds than to be swayed by their verbal harangues. Why the quest for personal power should disturb the serenity of mutual love with such compelling force is an issue that Milton, Melville and Dostoevsky address with varying degrees of self-consciousness. In their texts the seeds of disaster seem to sprout in both spiritual and barren soil, sometimes nurtured by a hierarchy that gave them birth, at others in reaction against a hierarchy that would stifle their energy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the origins and the consequences of such tensions.
Author: Y. Tzvi Langermann
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004194290
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Fourteen essays by leading scholars from around the world explore the theological, philosophical, and historical connections between the three Abrahamic faiths and ethics. Timely reading for students of religion, philosophy, and ethics.
Author: Francis Fallon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192602977
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
In a time marked by prominent public clashes between theists and atheists, much less attention has been given to the question of agnosticism, whether in public debate or in academic literature. This is all the more surprising given that so many in Western society feel unable to identify unequivocally with either theism or atheism. This book brings together some leading contemporary philosophers, from both the analytic and continental traditions, to give a sustained and in-depth treatment of the question of agnosticism. Approaching the question from a variety of stances and employing different methodologies, the contributors explore the various possible meanings of agnosticism today. Several of them develop what they describe as a 'New Agnosticism,' where the relationship with theism or forms of religious belief is not as mutually exclusive as has often been assumed. Others look for signs of agnosticism in places where it is not usually thought to be found, such as in forms of continental philosophy, and even in theology itself. They also raise interesting methodological questions at the intersection of analytic and continental philosophy. These are stimulating and innovative essays working with the most recent developments in philosophy and religious thought. They open up new avenues of thought that will be of interest to philosophers, theologians, and other thoughtful readers, whether theist, atheist, or agnostic.
Author: Murray Krieger
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142143119X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Originally published in 1973. Literary critics who have studied tragedy and the tragic vision failed, in Murray Krieger's estimation, to define exactly what they saw as the tragic vision in general terms. An aim of his book is to create a tentative definition of tragic and to flesh out what the author sees as the definition most illuminating of modern literature and the modern mind. In order to do this, Krieger distinguishes between what he sees as the "tragic vision" and "tragedy"—tragedy, from his perspective, is an object's literary form, whereas tragic vision refers to a subject's psychology, the subject's view and version of reality. In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionary" than a "tragic hero."
Author: William Irwin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538115891
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 159
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Book Description
Uncertainty is the essence of the human condition, and nothing is more uncertain than God. Yet passions run hot when it comes to God, both among believers and non-believers. God is a Question, Not an Answer aims to unsettle readers on both sides of the issue. William Irwin argues that because belief occurs along a continuum of doubt and we can never reach full certainty, believers and non-believers can find common ground in uncertainty. Beginning with the questions of what we mean when we talk about God and faith, Irwin shows that from a philosophical perspective, the tendency to doubt is a virtue, and from a religious perspective there is no faith without doubt. Rather than avoid uncertainty as an uncomfortable state of emotional despair, we should embrace it as an ennobling part of the human condition. We do not have to agree about the existence of God, but we do need to practice intellectual humility and learn to see doubt as a gift. By engaging in civil discourse we can see those who disagree with us as not only fully human but capable of teaching us something.
Author: Patrick Chura
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135501394
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
The book analyzes American literature about middle or upper class characters who voluntarily descend the class ranks to experience vital contact by living or associating, temporarily, with the poor. The motivations of these characters--and historical figures such as John Reed and Walter Wyckoff--range from straightforward bohemian slumming among the exotics to more complex and psychologically wrought investigations of cross-class empathy. The study begins by charting downclasing processes in works of canonical nineteenth-century authors, including Melville, Hawthorne, James, Howells and Jewett. It then undertakes an original analysis of John Reed's involvement with the 1913 Paterson silk workers' strike as a context for understanding Ernest Poole's (now forgotten, but then best-selling) fictionalization of the strike in his novel, The Harbor . In other richly historicized chapters, it analyzes distillations of class radicalism in several works by Upton Sinclair, in the early drama of Eugene O'Neill, and in feminist novels of the 1910s by Elia Peattie and Clara Laughlin. The concluding chapter looks at sophisticated treatments of vital contact in fiction of the 1930s by Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Richard Wright. The book provides Americanists with important new ways of thinking about various forms of class identification as they developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
