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>

Construction of Whiteness and Blackness in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno

Rather than resist slavery directly, the narrative world of Benito Cereno disperses the rejection of tyranny through the intricate construction of subject-object relations, the situational context, Benito Cereno’s stifled, semi-articulated statements, the imagery of the narrative and its complex narrative structure. Through silences, multiple viewpoints, innuendos, refusal to solve certain issues definitely while being explicit about this indeterminacy, Melville’s narrative not only inscribes itself in the Romantic questioning of historiography, but also gestures towards postmodernist inconclusiveness and the writerly text in which the reader is invited to be its co-author who fills out the gaps and silences with their own interpretation.

Playing Con Games in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

This chapter focuses on confidence games played in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986). These con games expose the weakness in the legal construction of people as property. In each novel, white characters conflate enslaved people with animals, but this conflation allows black characters to hide their agency. Blinded by racism, white characters become the dupes of con games in which black characters outwardly perform the identity of property while covertly taking on the agency of people. Despite legal resolutions that seem to restore order in Melville’s and Twain’s texts, lingering haunting reveals that the racial categories destroy everyone. Williams offers a twentieth-century answer to this destruction by imagining people formerly enslaved escaping to the West, thereby crafting the only con game that works.