The errant art of Moby-Dick : the canon, the Cold War, and the struggle for American studies / William V. Spanos.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spanos, William V.

Series:

New Americanists.

New Americanists

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Moby Dick.

Melville, Herman.

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891--Influence.

Politics and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Politics and literature.

Literature and society--United States--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

Sea stories, American--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Sea stories, American.

American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

American literature.

Criticism--United States--History--20th century.

Criticism.

Canon (Literature).

Cold War.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (393 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, one of America’s most distinguished critics reexamines Melville’s monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. In Moby-Dick—a work virtually ignored and discredited at the time of its publication—William V. Spanos uncovers a text remarkably suited as a foundation for a "New Americanist" critique of the ideology based on Puritan origins that was codified in the canon established by "Old Americanist" critics from F. O. Matthiessen to Lionel Trilling. But Spanos also shows, with the novel still as his focus, the limitations of this "New Americanist" discourse and its failure to escape the totalizing imperial perspective it finds in its predecessor.Combining Heideggerian ontology with a sociopolitical perspective derived primarily from Foucault, the reading of Moby-Dick that forms the center of this book demonstrates that the traditional identification of Melville’s novel as a "romance" renders it complicitous in the discourse of the Cold War. At the same time, Spanos shows how New Americanist criticism overlooks the degree to which Moby-Dick anticipates not only America’s self-representation as the savior of the world against communism, but also the emergent postmodern and anti-imperial discourse deployed against such an image. Spanos’s critique reveals the extraordinary relevance of Melville’s novel as a post-Cold War text, foreshadowing not only the self-destructive end of the historical formation of the American cultural identity in the genocidal assault on Vietnam, but also the reactionary labeling of the current era as "the end of history."This provocative and challenging study presents not only a new view of the development of literary history in the United States, but a devastating critique of the genealogy of ideology in the American cultural establishment.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. MOBY-DICK AND THE AMERICAN CANON

Posthumanist Theory and Canon Formation

A Genealogical History of the Reception of Moby-Dick, 1850-1945

The New Americanist "Field-Imaginary" and the Vietnam War

The New Americanists and Moby-Dick

The Limits of the New Americanist Discourse

2. METAPHYSICS AND SPATIAL FORM: MELVILLE'S CRITIQUE OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION

Tragic Vision and Metaphysics

Tragic Vision and Moby-Dick

Melville's Errant Measure: The Testimony of the Fiction Following Moby-Dick

3. THE ERRANT ART OF MOBY-DICK

The Question of Ishmael's Name

Ishmael's Reading of Father Mapple's Reading of the Jonah Text

The Centered Circle, the Imperial Gaze, and Abasement

The American Adam and the Naming of the White Whale

Ishmael and the Unnaming of Moby Dick

Ishmael, Theory, and Practice

The Self as Orphan

Ishmael and Negative Capability

Representation and Errancy: The Art of Narration

Cetology and Discipline

Political Economy in Moby-Dick: Toward a Counterhegemony

Repetition and the Indissoluble Continuum of Being: Melville's Polis

Moby-Dick as Diabolic Book

The Question of Ishmael's Name: A Repetition

The Struggle to Appropriate Moby-Dick: Indeterminacy and Positionality

4. MOBY-DICK AND THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN OCCASION

The "Vietnam Syndrome"

Fredric Jameson and Frank Lentricchia: Reading Michael Herr's Dispatches

The Postmodernity of the Vietnam War

Moby-Dick and the Vietnam War

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [353]-363) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822315995

0822315998

9780822379584

0822379589

OCLC:

624266479