scholarly journals An Eco-critical Analysis of Moby Dick

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
Yue Zhao ◽  
◽  
Mengyang Zhang ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Author ◽  
American Society ◽  
Realistic Significance

Moby Dick is well acknowledged as a world masterpiece by the American author Herman Melville. This paper attempts to analyze Melville’s Moby Dick by the theory of eco-criticism. In order to better approach the American society before the 1950s, the author aims to scrutinize the novel with eco-criticism from three such aspects as nature, society and spirit so that the present society can gain some insights in preventing and solving similar problems. Divided into several parts as follows, this paper introduces Melville and Moby Dick as well as eco-criticism first and then interprets the novel via eco-criticism in three aspects, and finally ends with its realistic significance as a conclusion.

scholarly journals In the center of a circle: poetics of space in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and H. Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick, or The Whale”

Litera ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Anna Viktorovna Dulina
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Spatial Dimensions ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Distinct Features ◽  
The Impact

This article is dedicated to the analysis of peculiarities of space arrangement in the “Divine Comedy” by Alighieri and the novel Moby-Dick, or The Whale” by Herman Melville. On the examples of structural mythologemes “journey inside yourself” and “path towards the center of a circle”, present in both works, the author notes the impact of Dante upon Melville and determines the differences in their poetics of space. Structural, semantic and comparative-historical analysis of the texts in question allows speaking of the transformation of symbolism of the images of circle and its center, circular, vertical and horizontal movement, as well as reconsideration of meaning of the category of chaos and order, opposition “internal-external” from Dante’s works to worldview of the authors of the era of Romanticism. The novelty of this work consists in simultaneous analysis of the impact of Dante’s poetry upon Melville and comparison of peculiarities of the poetics of space of both authors for determining fundamental changes in representations of the structure of world space and space of the inner world of a person. In artistic realm of H. Melville, symbolic point of the center of a circle – “center of the world” –is no longer static, it becomes unreliable, depicting heads of madman characters and the images of the objects, which semantics does not resemble the concept of emptiness. The motif of the loss of structuredness along with the motif of mutual reciprocity of spatial dimensions and characteristics distinguish Melville’s poetics of space, delineated in the dialogue with distinct features of space arrangement in Dante’s works.

Melville's Intervisionary Network

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Haydock
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Honore De Balzac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Innovative Environment ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Literary Networks ◽  
The Web

The romances of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts. Intervisionary Network explores a range of these connections and reveals that Melville was dependent on Balzac and his universal vision in much of his prose writing.

scholarly journals Patricia Highsmith's Queer Disruption: Subverting Gay Tragedy in the 1950s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Charlotte Findlay
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Lesbian Couple ◽  
Gay Literature ◽  
Gays And Lesbians ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Society

<p>Published in a time when tragedy was pervasive in gay literature, Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, published later as Carol, was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. It was unusual for depicting lesbians as sympathetic, ordinary women, whose sexuality did not consign them to a life of misery. The novel criticises how 1950s American society worked to suppress lesbianism and women’s agency. It also refuses to let that suppression succeed by giving its lesbian couple a future together. My thesis assesses the extent to which the novel broke the conventions of gay literature, and how Highsmith was able to publish such a radical text in the conservative 1950s.  The Talented Mr Ripley, a crime novel published in 1955, is more representative of both Highsmith’s work and 1950s homophobia. Tom Ripley is coded as gay through a number of often pejorative stereotypes, though the novel never confirms his sexuality. This makes it appear far more conventional than The Price of Salt. And yet, it treats Tom sympathetically and gives him a happy ending. Underneath the surface level homophobia is a story of gay survival and success, and once again Highsmith subverts the tradition of gay tragedy. However, because homophobic tropes are central to its narrative, it remains difficult to call Ripley a radical text.  In placing the two novels side by side, my thesis draws out the complexity of Highsmith’s relationship with the gay canon. I find commonalities in the novels based on Highsmith’s interest in disrupting conventional morality. She achieves this disruption by humanising outsiders such as gays and lesbians, and constructing narratives in which they are able to find the freedom and happiness that the literature of the period usually denied them.</p>

scholarly journals The Real America: Representation of American Society in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Based on Michel Foucault’s Notions of Institutions, Normalization, and Surveillance

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iraj Soleymanjahan ◽  
Nasser Maleki ◽  
Hiwa Weisi
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Government ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
On The Road ◽  
American Society ◽  
Fitting In

This study aimed to scrutinize and analyze the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac in the light of the political theory of Michel Foucault. The focus, however, would be specifically on the concepts of normalization, institutions and surveillance put forward in his book Discipline and Punish (1995), coupled with some other works that wrestle with the close links of power, society, and institutions. This research seeked to describe the real America in the 1950s, a decade that witnessed both conformism and radicality, represented in the novel. The study pointed out that the novel was a depiction of the American society in the 1950s in which distinct, overlapping institutions did a great deal in restricting the freedom of individuals who seeked liberation and authenticity. The American government draws on the power of the law, police, prison, academia, family, and different other overlapping and satellite institutions, working hand in hand to create a matrix. The concept of matrix, therefore, highlights the nexus through which the normalization and conformity of the individuals are guaranteed, leading to the creation of perfect institutionalized men who are reduced to the level of simpletons. The whole novel becomes the story of some men who advocate abnormality as their credo to live a free life. Quite the contrary, they are transitioned into meek and docile bodies whose identity hinges on being like others in fitting in and following the norms through different dominant fragmenting institutions.

scholarly journals Patricia Highsmith's Queer Disruption: Subverting Gay Tragedy in the 1950s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Charlotte Findlay
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Lesbian Couple ◽  
Gay Literature ◽  
Gays And Lesbians ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Society

<p>Published in a time when tragedy was pervasive in gay literature, Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, published later as Carol, was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. It was unusual for depicting lesbians as sympathetic, ordinary women, whose sexuality did not consign them to a life of misery. The novel criticises how 1950s American society worked to suppress lesbianism and women’s agency. It also refuses to let that suppression succeed by giving its lesbian couple a future together. My thesis assesses the extent to which the novel broke the conventions of gay literature, and how Highsmith was able to publish such a radical text in the conservative 1950s.  The Talented Mr Ripley, a crime novel published in 1955, is more representative of both Highsmith’s work and 1950s homophobia. Tom Ripley is coded as gay through a number of often pejorative stereotypes, though the novel never confirms his sexuality. This makes it appear far more conventional than The Price of Salt. And yet, it treats Tom sympathetically and gives him a happy ending. Underneath the surface level homophobia is a story of gay survival and success, and once again Highsmith subverts the tradition of gay tragedy. However, because homophobic tropes are central to its narrative, it remains difficult to call Ripley a radical text.  In placing the two novels side by side, my thesis draws out the complexity of Highsmith’s relationship with the gay canon. I find commonalities in the novels based on Highsmith’s interest in disrupting conventional morality. She achieves this disruption by humanising outsiders such as gays and lesbians, and constructing narratives in which they are able to find the freedom and happiness that the literature of the period usually denied them.</p>

scholarly journals THE TEACHING OF LITERARY TRANSLATION AND THE CONSISTENCY OF EQUIVALENTS TO OBTAIN FUNCTIONAL TARGET NARRATIVES: ANALYSIS OF THE RENDERING OF MOBY DICK BY HERMAN MELVILLE FROM ENGLISH INTO SPANISH

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 510-539
Author(s):  
Robert Szymyślik
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Teaching Methods ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Moby Dick

This paper was developed to draw conclusions about the teaching methods that can be applied to the translation of literary works and about the study of the needs for consistency concerning rendering options in order for students to produce functional target narratives. It was carried out through the analysis of the novel entitled Moby Dick by Herman Melville from English into Spanish from the point of view of transversal narrative coherence. It centres its attention on the multiple translation options that can be employed to transfer specific extracts of this novel (such as verbs and pronouns whose equivalents must be maintained throughout the complete text) and on showing the importance of a consistent use of these translation options to obtain a functional target text. Keywords: literary translation, Melville, Moby Dick, narrative consistency, translation teaching

Nested Inversions: Genre and the Bipartite Form of Herman Melville's Pierre

2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-464
Author(s):  
Jonathan Crimmins
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Real Solution ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Mixed Form ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Mode Of Production ◽  
As If ◽  
Generic Elements

Jonathan Crimmins, "Nested Inversions: Genre and the Bipartite Form of Herman Melville's Pierre" (pp. 437––464) In this essay I suggest that Herman Melville constructed Pierre (1852) as a diptych, an early example of the form that he later employed in his stories for Harper's and Putnam's magazines. He characterized Pierre's two halves by their settings, countryside and city, and used the locales allegorically to represent the ideological value systems associated with the mode of production of each. Further, I argue that Melville constrained the scope of the mixed form, more freely practiced in Mardi (1849) and Moby-Dick (1851), by carefully aligning the generic elements of Pierre with its bipartite structure: the sentimental and the Gothic with the first half of the novel, the urban and romantic with the second half. subordinating the generic elements to the structure, Melville built a novel in which each half operates according to different laws, each as its own separate stage, enacting the drama of its treasured beliefs and the inescapable hypocrisies of those beliefs. Each half of Pierre presents the justice of its values as natural and the logic of its values as complete. And yet, set side-by-side as a diptych so as to suggest equal measure, the competing claims to totality collapse; while each ideological stage acts as if its value systems are unified and whole, side-by-side they are seen as inverted schematics, as two halves of a single crisis. Melville shows the contradictory dependence of capitalism's ideology of historical contingency and feudalism's faith in an idealist grounding of the historical, offering up the insolubility of the crisis as the empty indicator of a real solution.

The Experiment of Experience: Ronald Sukenick and Mark Amerika's Performative Theory of Writing

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-305
Author(s):  
Lucia Esposito
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Digital World ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
American Author ◽  
Textual Performance

The paper analyses some texts by the American author Ronald Sukenick (particularly the 1969 short story ‘The Death of the Novel’, included in a collection by the same name) and links them to some recent works by Mark Amerika in order to show the way experimental writing can be conveniently used as a means to investigate the nature and role of literature in critical transition periods. Sukenick started to write in the sixties, at a time in which a prevailing feeling of the novel's exhaustion dominated, and experimented a new kind of non-mimetic, experiential writing – literature performed as an extemporaneous event and an embodied experience – that Amerika was to foreground later, in the period in which literature was being ferried to the digital world. The two authors (and both professors), who also collaborated on some projects, seem to share the same penchant for an acrobatic (con)fusion of storytelling and theoretical and critical analysis, and the result is a textual performance that situates the metacommentary as literary production.

The Gnosis of Toni Morrison: Morrison’s Conversation with Herman Melville, with a Nod to Umberto Eco

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-376
Author(s):  
Justine Tally
Keyword(s):  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Nag Hammadi ◽  
The Us ◽  
The University ◽  
The Rose

Abstract Long before Toni Morrison was extensively recognized as a serious contender in the “Global Market of Intellectuals,” she was obviously reading and absorbing challenging critical work that was considered “provocative and controversial” by the keepers of the US academic community at the time. While no one disputes the influence of Elaine Pagels’ work on Gnosticism at the University of Princeton, particularly its importance for Jazz and Paradise, the second and third novels of the Morrison trilogy, Gnosticism in Beloved has not been so carefully considered. Yet this keen interest in Gnosticism coupled with the author’s systematic study of authors from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance inevitably led her to deal with the fascination of Renaissance authors with Egypt (where the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were rediscovered), its ancient civilization, and its mythology. The extensive analysis of a leading French literary critic of Herman Melville, Prof. Viola Sachs, becomes the inspiration for a startlingly different reading of Morrison’s seminal novel, one that positions this author in a direct dialogue with the premises of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also drawing on the importance of Gnosticism for Umberto Eco’s 1980 international best-seller, The Name of the Rose.

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