“Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener”:

2018 ◽  
pp. 419-488 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
Benito Cereno

scholarly journals Race, Class, and Herman Melville

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan De Santis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
American Society ◽  
Benito Cereno

<p>Analyzes two of the short stories in Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales, "Bartleby the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street" and "Benito Cereno" and argues that these stories are highly critical of the bourgeois class structure of American society that inform Wall Street, as well as the slave trade, in mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Posits that in these works Melville addresses the questions of hierarchical power in the workplace and the effects of racism and slavery in the colonization of America.</p>

Bartleby's Closed Desk: Reading Melville against Affect

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-371
Author(s):  
YOSHIAKI FURUI
Keyword(s):  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
Benito Cereno ◽  
The Relationship

To reconsider the affective turn in American literary studies, this essay reads Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), with reference to “Benito Cereno” (1855) andThe Confidence-Man(1857), as an anti-affect story. By shedding light on silent characters in these works – Bartleby, Babo, and Black Guinea – it argues that Melville endeavors to adumbrate, not articulate, their private interiorities through language. Calling the inner recesses of his silent characters “secret emotions,” Melville probes into the boundaries between the effable and the ineffable by testing the limits of literary language. If “affect” refers to the kind of emotion that eludes signification through language, reading Melville in this manner encourages a reappraisal of the relationship between affect as a non-linguistic emotion and literature as a linguistic construct.

“An Unquestionable Source?”

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-179
Author(s):  
John Cyril Barton
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Old World ◽  
Spanish Inquisition ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Benito Cereno ◽  
The Town ◽  
Parallel Action

This essay is the first to examine Melville’s “The Town-Ho’s Story” (Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick [1851]) in relation to W. B. Stevenson’s then-popular-but-now-forgotten British travel narrative, Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825). Drawing from suggestive circumstances and parallel action unfolding in each, I make a case for the English sailor’s encounter with the Spanish Inquisition in Lima as important source material for the Limanian setting that frames Melville’s tale. In bringing to light a new source for Moby-Dick, I argue that Melville refracts Stevenson’s actual encounter with the Inquisition in Lima to produce a symbolic, mock confrontation with Old-World authority represented in the inquisitorial Dons and the overall context of the story. Thus, the purpose of the essay is twofold: first, to recover an elusive source for understanding the allusive framework of “The Town-Ho’s Story,” a setting that has perplexed some of Melville’s best critics; and second, to illuminate Melville’s use of Lima and the Inquisition as tropes crucial for understanding a larger symbolic confrontation between the modern citizen (or subject) and despotic authority that plays out not only in Moby-Dick but also in other works such as Mardi (1849), White-Jacket (1850), “Benito Cereno” (1855), Clarel (1876), and The Confidence-Man (1857), wherein the last of which the author wrote on the frontispiece of a personal copy, “Dedicated to Victims of Auto da Fe.”

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lurie
Keyword(s):  
American Art ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Benito Cereno

This introduction orients this book’s argument surrounding history’s visibility. It points to a tradition of visualizing history initiated by D. W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation and suggests links between it and a later critical tradition of falsely presuming history’s accessibility. It takes up recent challenges to politicized cultural scholarship and identifies the book’s investment in examining the terms on which so-called American art and culture have been defined. Edgar Allan Poe’s Pym and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” offer templates for the later discussions of writers’ and filmmakers’ choice to eschew direct representations of history. It links these moves to New Formalist methodology and places the study’s approach within this field, describing the book’s moves from treating modernist writers to discussing the postmodern cinema of Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers. It takes up a tenet of modernist scholarship that questions notions of a putatively transcendent, disembodied subject.

Work and purpose: A return to Sisyphus and Bartleby

2021 ◽  
pp. 1354067X2110474
Author(s):  
Pedro F Bendassolli
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Meaning Of Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Work Relationship ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
Oriented Activity ◽  
The Relationship

Work is a semiotically oriented activity, that is, when working, individuals anticipate aspects of their activity using a network of signs and meanings and project themselves in time with the aim to achieve certain goals. This study proposes a discussion on the relationship between purpose and work and distinguishes purpose as objective, related to actions aimed at goals, and purpose as a glimpse or a hyper-generalized sign. Both of these purposes are related to other dimensions of an individual’s relationship, with their work that are not contained in their actions aimed at situated ends. From a methodological viewpoint, the arguments are developed based on the analysis of two fictional characters, inspired by the cultural psychology of semiotic orientation: Sisyphus, extracted from classical literature, and Bartleby, the scrivener of the novel of the same name written by Herman Melville. Based on this analysis, we propose considering the purpose–work relationship on two axes: (1) what articulates sense-meaning in the process of meaning-making, and (2) the axis of action potency and its relationship with the concepts of emptiness and contingency based on a human agent’s experiences in culture. The paper aims to contribute both to the cultural psychology of semiotic orientation and to the literature on the meaning of work.

scholarly journals Office Setting as Organizational Structure in “Bartleby the Scrivener”

SAGE Open ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401769043
Author(s):  
Lori Duin Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Structure ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Institutional Ethnography ◽  
Interpersonal Dynamics ◽  
Office Setting ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
A Site

This article uses a methodology from the social sciences known as institutional ethnography to analyze the office setting in Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a site of social organization. This approach contributes to an understanding of how that office came to adopt specific structures as crucial to its functioning and how, as a consequence of those structures, individuals’ roles within the organization’s hierarchies became constituted. As fieldwork occurs inside of organizations, institutional ethnography also provides a tool for identifying and evaluating linguistic markers for an individual’s placement within a larger organizational structure. This approach to the story seems particularly useful for understanding the interpersonal dynamics at the heart of “Bartleby.” At the same time, it provides a method for identifying the larger institutional process at work in Melville’s story, one that contributes to the reproduction of a system of social relations in the workplace that requires subordination and compliance to insure its success.

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