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Author: William V. Spanos
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791475645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U.S.-led global “war on terror.”
Author: William V. Spanos
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791475645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U.S.-led global “war on terror.”
Author: William V. Spanos
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 687
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Book Description
This carefully crafted ebook: "MOBY DICK (Modern Classics Series)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: first published in 1851, considered to be one of the Great American Novels and a treasure of world literature, one of the great epics in all of literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab has one purpose on this voyage: to seek out Moby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white sperm whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off his leg, which now drives Ahab to take revenge...
Author: Charles Olson
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1789126231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences—especially Shakespearean ones—on Melville’s writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the “theory of the two Moby-Dicks,” Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville’s reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: “the first book did not contain Ahab,” writes Olson, and “it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick.” If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with varying degrees of skepticism to the “theory of the two Moby-Dicks,” it was the experimental style and organization of the book that generated the most controversy. Passionate in his poetry, Olson was no less passionate in his reading of Melville. Impatient with what he regarded as traditional forms of literary criticism, Olson engaged his own creativity to write a book as robust, original, and compelling as Melville’s masterpiece. “Not only important, but apocalyptic.”—New York Herald Tribune “One of the most stimulating essays ever written on Moby-Dick, and for that matter on any piece of literature, and the forces behind it.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Olson has been a tireless student of Melville and every Melville lover owes him a debt for his Scotland Yard pertinacity in getting on the trail of Melville’s dispersed library.”—Lewis Mumford, New York Times “Records, often brilliantly, one way of taking the most extraordinary of American books.”—W. E. Bezanson, New England Quarterly “The most important contribution to Melville criticism since Raymond Weaver’s pioneering contribution in 1921.”—George Mayberry, New Republic
Author: William V. Spanos
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801899346
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Critics predominantly view Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor as a “testament of acceptance,” the work of a man who had become politically conservative in his last years. William V. Spanos disagrees, arguing that the novella was not only a politically radical critique of American exceptionalism but also an eerie preview of the state of exception employed, most recently, by the George W. Bush administration in the post–9/11 War on Terror. While Billy Budd, Sailor is ostensibly about the Napoleonic Wars, Spanos contends that it is at heart a cautionary tale addressed to the American public as the country prepared to extend its westward expansion into the Pacific Ocean by way of establishing a global imperial navy. Through a close, symptomatic reading of Melville’s text, Spanos rescues from critical oblivion the pervasive, dense, and decisive details that disclose the consequences of normalizing the state of exception—namely, the transformation of the criminal into the policeman (Claggart) and of the political human being into the disposable reserve that can be killed with impunity (Billy Budd). What this shows, Spanos demonstrates, is that Melville's uncanny attunement to the dark side of the American exceptionalism myth enabled him to foresee its threat to the very core of democracy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This view, Spanos believes, anticipates the state of exception theory that has emerged in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Jacques Ranciere, among other critical theorists. The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception illustrates that Melville, in his own time, was aware of the negative consequences of the deeply inscribed exceptionalist American identity and recognized the essential domestic and foreign policy issues that inform the country’s national security program today.
Author: William V. Spanos
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791477746
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U.S.-led global “war on terror.”
Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: Pushkin Collection
ISBN: 1782277463
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
A new selection of Melville's darkest and most enthralling stories in a beautiful Pushkin Collection edition Includes "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno" and "The Lightning-Rod Man" A lawyer hires a new copyist, only to be met with stubborn, confounding resistance. A nameless guide discovers hidden worlds of luxury and bleak exploitation. After boarding a beleaguered Spanish slave ship, an American trader's cheerful outlook is repeatedly shadowed by paralyzing unease. In these stories of the surreal mundanity of office life and obscure tensions at sea, Melville's darkly modern sensibility plunges us into a world of irony and mystery, where nothing is as it first appears.
Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101624019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
From the bestselling author of Assassination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot, an insightful and unconventional account of George Washington’s trusted officer and friend, that swashbuckling teenage French aristocrat the Marquis de Lafayette. Chronicling General Lafayette’s years in Washington’s army, Vowell reflects on the ideals of the American Revolution versus the reality of the Revolutionary War. Riding shotgun with Lafayette, Vowell swerves from the high-minded debates of Independence Hall to the frozen wasteland of Valley Forge, from bloody battlefields to the Palace of Versailles, bumping into John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Cornwallis, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and various kings, Quakers and redcoats along the way. Drawn to the patriots’ war out of a lust for glory, Enlightenment ideas and the traditional French hatred for the British, young Lafayette crossed the Atlantic expecting to join forces with an undivided people, encountering instead fault lines between the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, rebel and loyalist inhabitants, and a conspiracy to fire George Washington, the one man holding together the rickety, seemingly doomed patriot cause. While Vowell’s yarn is full of the bickering and infighting that marks the American past—and present—her telling of the Revolution is just as much a story of friendship: between Washington and Lafayette, between the Americans and their French allies and, most of all between Lafayette and the American people. Coinciding with one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history, Vowell lingers over the elderly Lafayette’s sentimental return tour of America in 1824, when three fourths of the population of New York City turned out to welcome him ashore. As a Frenchman and the last surviving general of the Continental Army, Lafayette belonged to neither North nor South, to no political party or faction. He was a walking, talking reminder of the sacrifices and bravery of the revolutionary generation and what the founders hoped this country could be. His return was not just a reunion with his beloved Americans it was a reunion for Americans with their own astonishing, singular past. Vowell’s narrative look at our somewhat united states is humorous, irreverent and wholly original.
Author: William V. Spanos
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791472903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Connects the American exceptionalist ethos to the violence in Vietnam and the Middle East.
Author: Nathaniel Philbrick
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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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
