Publishing Scholarly Editions

Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. After the Introduction (Section 1), Sections 2 and 3 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. These ideas are demonstrated in two editorial exhibitions of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 4 uses pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and multimedia experience. The Conclusion (Section 5) draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why digital editions have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic inventions based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing can embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience.

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.

New Light on the Trial of Billy Budd

This essay focuses on the legality and legitimacy of the proceedings by which the young Royal Navy crewman Billy Budd is sentenced to death for a false and malicious charge of mutiny in Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd, Sailor. Its ultimate position is that Captain Edward Vere, who oversees the proceedings and sentences Budd to death by hanging, is neither clearly a hero nor a villain. Instead, the novel embraces ambiguity by intentionally arming each side of the debate with considerable firepower, leaving readers with a quandary that would have been familiar to Melville’s readers because it paralleled the unsettled public debate over the 1842 case of the USS Somers. Billy Budd is thus neither an illustration of the bitter consequences of a strict rule of law, nor a tale of legal manipulation by an unchecked tyrant. Rather, it is “a story about confronting a case almost too hard to imagine.”

Cnota, charakter, dobroć. W nawiązaniu do powieści autobiograficznej Raimonda Gaity Mój ojciec Romulus

Przedmiotem tekstu jest rozróżnienie między dobrocią i cnotą oraz złem i występkiem, wprowadzone przez Hannah Arendt na podstawie lektury powieści Hermanna Melville’a Billy Budd. Rozróżnienie to analizuję, odnosząc się do historii życia Romulusa Gaity, bohatera powieści autobiograficznej Mój ojciec Romulus, której autorem jest australijski etyk Raimond Gaita. W paragrafie 1 zajmuję się ową dystynkcją, wskazując na przewartościowanie takich pojęć, jak cnota i występek w powieści Melville’a oraz jego rozumienie cnoty. Następnie (paragraf 2) staram się odpowiedzieć na pytanie, dlaczego Gaita pisze o swym ojcu, używając kategorii charakteru, a nie cnoty. Dalej (paragraf 3) podejmuję refleksję nad relacją między cnotą, charakterem, dobrocią a chorobą psychiczną Romulusa. Na koniec (paragraf 4) odpowiadam na pytanie, jaki jest metafizyczny fundament, na którym Gaita formułuje przekonanie o wyższości Dobra i dobroci nad cnotą oraz pokazuję, jakie konkrety składają się na przyjmowaną przez Romulusa etykę dobroci.