Uncertain Credit: Melville's Affective Economies

<p>Despite taking place in putatively “lawless” settings, Melville’s maritime fiction maps complex economies of obligation: characters draw up contracts, extend credit, and broker promissory exchanges for goods among themselves, in spite of the absence of any state or legal authority which would enforce their agreements and thereby guarantee the speculative values they call into being. Instead of being underwritten by the law, these contractual relations are characterised by their affective conditions of possibility. In these works, transacting business with strangers in mobile and itinerant spaces requires characters to develop ways of reading the character and creditworthiness of others in order to suppress suspicion and install confidence in its place. Taking “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857) as its key texts, this thesis tracks these economies of obligation as they emerge in and around Melville’s maritime fictions, which solicit the credit and trust of their readers while continually revising and renegotiating the terms on which that credit is to be extended. By interpolating spurious or broken contracts between characters into the structure of their narratives, these texts foreground the unstable or even illegible terms of the contract which literary texts make with their readers.</p>

Uncertain Credit: Melville's Affective Economies

<p>Despite taking place in putatively “lawless” settings, Melville’s maritime fiction maps complex economies of obligation: characters draw up contracts, extend credit, and broker promissory exchanges for goods among themselves, in spite of the absence of any state or legal authority which would enforce their agreements and thereby guarantee the speculative values they call into being. Instead of being underwritten by the law, these contractual relations are characterised by their affective conditions of possibility. In these works, transacting business with strangers in mobile and itinerant spaces requires characters to develop ways of reading the character and creditworthiness of others in order to suppress suspicion and install confidence in its place. Taking “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857) as its key texts, this thesis tracks these economies of obligation as they emerge in and around Melville’s maritime fictions, which solicit the credit and trust of their readers while continually revising and renegotiating the terms on which that credit is to be extended. By interpolating spurious or broken contracts between characters into the structure of their narratives, these texts foreground the unstable or even illegible terms of the contract which literary texts make with their readers.</p>

"Strangers Still More Strange": The Meaning of Rivers Bedeviled

Steamboats transformed rivers in 19th-century United States, providing what many people considered a kind of mastery over nature. In literature from the period, while most writers marveled at or exulted in that perceived mastery, some questioned the origins of the reputed conquest. Did it result from human ingenuity? divine inspiration? a deal with the devil? Amid all the fog, smoke, and various other vapors associated with the steamboat, vivid stories, compelling dramas, and comic searches for meaning took shape, and no literary work captured the tension informing, uncertainty surrounding, and ramifications emerging from this instance of technological innovation as powerfully as The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Herman Melville’s last novel, The Confidence-Man explores the author’s notion that “Books of fiction” can perhaps give readers more truth, “more reality, than real life can show.” Literature, for Melville, was an opportunity to reconsider the nature of things and our means of understanding that nature. In The Confidence-Man, he presented readers with a different view of the Mississippi River and the curious vessels working its waters. The novel imagined The Devil himself to be on board the steamboat, imperiling the soul of America.

Dread, Foolishness, Wisdom

This chapter explores Melville’s commentary on the collection of aphorisms known as the book of Proverbs and how he responds to its central propositions: fear of God as a prerequisite for attaining wisdom, the dichotomy between wisdom and folly, and the antinomian problem of God as the author of evil. Proverbs, it argues, enables Melville to frame his contemplation of theology and skepticism by confronting evil in its numerous guises as ontological fact. Because proverbs are portable and pragmatic, they allow Melville to comment politically on contemporary American reality (faith, economics, political and cultural institutions). The chapter discusses Mardi, “The Lightning-Rod Man,” The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd, showing how proverbs initially connote revolutionary political potential in Melville’s work but soon are rendered ineffectual and used only to indict American political, economic, and cultural industries for successfully conspiring to purge wisdom from all personal interaction and jurisprudence.

Lonely miles of wasteland: Radiating failure in Fallout 4

In this article, I analyse a radio voice in a post-apocalyptic video game, Fallout 4, set in the future ruins of Boston, Massachusetts. In the quest ‘Confidence Man’, players participate in the heteromasculinization of a failing radio disc jockey, Travis Miles, engaging him in the violence and relations of the post-nuclear war wasteland. Despite the ludic elements at play, Fallout 4 teleologically curtails player agency in Travis’ vocal puberty. I argue that Fallout 4’s ‘Confidence Man’ circulates gendered, nationalistic and capitalistic discourses, which assume an idealized confident radio voice as the natural, preferred intimate aesthetic and which reject the awkward, queer intimate aesthetic. Travis’ transformation into the confidence man Travis ‘Lonely’ Miles fulfils the sonic pleasure ethos of a capitalist formation, one that demands an appropriate aesthetic for a game-world centred on a neocolonial settler imperative.

The American Claimant

The introduction outlines the idea of the American claimant, an American heir to a British estate, and traces it back to medieval lost-heir romances such as Havelok. In lost-heir romances, a hero is stolen or banished before he or she can inherit riches or power. She or he is thought to be dead, but by good fortune is saved. Often, she then works as a servant; certainly, her life is humble and obscure. But she thrives, and eventually returns, to be restored to her rightful position. The introduction also discusses real cases—James Annesley, the Tichborne Claimant, and those Nathaniel Hawthorne records in Our Old Home. It suggests a relationship with the figure of the confidence man, and discusses underlying preoccupations, including gentlemen and servants, and dress and undress.