The thesis examines isolation and caritas, or charity, in The Confidence-Man as polar themes which express, respectively, withdrawal from and suspicion of the human community and integration within and appreciation for that community. Isolation is considered a negative theme; caritas, an affirmative theme.

This study of the elements of the Byronic hero in Herman Melville's Captain Ahab includes a look at the Byronic hero and Byron himself, the Byronic hero and the Gothic tradition, the Byronic hero and his "humanities," and the Byronic hero and Prometheus-Lucifer.

Berlin, Freie Universiẗat, Diss., 2002. / Dateiformat: zip, Dateien im PDF-Format.

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Thesis advisor: Christopher P. Wilson / Witnessing Empire is a cultural history of the American war correspondent. I trace the figure through various points of crisis in the making of U.S. sovereignty including the U.S.-Mexico War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. Locating correspondents like Herman Melville, Richard Harding Davis, and Stephen Crane in what Mary Louise Pratt terms "contact zones"--areas of cross-cultural exchange and contest--I show in this interdisciplinary work how the figure emerged through confronting U.S. state power with "on the spot" visual and textual witness accounts of the violence entailed by that power in a period of territorial expansion across the hemisphere, mass media development, and renewed aesthetic challenges to representing war. Revising critical appraisals of U.S. empire, including those of Amy Kaplan, that argue that the war correspondent is simply an apologist for U.S. imperialism through a facile use of romance, realism, spectacle, and sensationalism, I argue that the figure carves out a unique vision via such familiar conventions to unveil the contradictions of U.S. imperialism--particularly, its reliance on a narrative of liberation and protection through conquest. The dissertation thus unveils the correspondent as ambivalent towards this narrative as his witnessed accounts reveal subjects less protected, than abandoned by the state. I argue that through exposing the violence of this abandonment, the correspondent develops a new literary convention that exposes the consequences of modern war. In Chapter 1, I historically situate war correspondence as an emergent form, comparing the writings of the New Orleans-based Picayune war correspondent George Wilkins Kendall, composed on the eve of the U.S.-Mexico War, with Herman Melville's Typee. An unorthodox travel narrative, Typee can be more effectively read as an inaugural work of war correspondence in its challenging of "race war" as a discourse employed to cement state power in the contact zone. Chapter 2 takes up the "on the spot" pencil line drawings of the Civil War "special artists." Comparing these artists' works with the published engravings in the newspapers at the time and the illustrated histories at the turn-of-the-century, I address the visual rhetoric by which war correspondents depicted the crisis of sovereignty entailed by the Civil War. The second half of the dissertation illustrates the emergence of war correspondence as a unique aesthetic form. Chapter 3 looks at how Richard Harding Davis crafts war correspondence as a critique of U.S. imperialism's spectacle-oriented "anti-imperialist" liberation narrative by opposing the production of an "imperial news apparatus" at the turn-of-the-century with the advent of the Spanish-American War. In Chapter 4, I show how Stephen Crane, like Davis, was inspired by the anti-statism and transnationalism of the antebellum filibuster. From his initial experiments in Red Badge of Courage, Crane was focused on the subjectivity of the witness in his correspondence and fiction, ultimately allegorizing the violence of U.S. imperial power and its abandonment of citizens and non-citizens alike in war zone. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Herman Melville’s final novel The Confidence-Man destabilizes conventional Western models of ethical behavior, particularly Kantian notions of moral agency, by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. The Confidence-Man shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in their understanding and justify their moral choices. I use these insights from The Confidence-Man to illuminate Melville’s opposition to the missionaries’ work of civilizing and Christianizing the South Seas islanders in his earlier travelogues. In Typee, his first novel, Melville demonstrates that layers of existence—in fact, real human lives—are denied when the story of human relations is framed as a narrative of progress. This thesis concludes by proposing that Melville reworks the idea of failure as a potential strategy against the totalizing narrative of advancing rationalism.

This project considers the objective and material manifestations of invention, as well as the subjective processes (creative and mechanical) that invention signifies, in order to examine the historical, aesthetic, and ideological roles that invention plays within American literature. I argue that invention calls attention to a paradox within American culture that literary texts are especially adept at revealing: the newness that invention fetishizes often contains a violent underside, which American literary authors both depict and complicate. In chapter 1 I establish the project's foundation--how invention became such a culturally prominent mode of action, and how inventions came to symbolize the march of American "progress." I treat the rhetoric of invention as a text which can be close-read for what it reveals about the role of American artifice in the nation's self-conception.In chapter two I argue that Herman Melville's Typee delivers a series of inventive counter-narratives that disarm the stereotypes that support colonization, and that deflate the sense of superiority that propelled Western colonialism. Using the rhetoric of invention against itself, including its portrayal of patents and intellectual property as necessary regulative mechanisms in the advancement of technology and industry, Typee undermines this logic by tapping into the subversive potential of invention as a creative force.Chapter two examines the various historical, aesthetic and disciplinary roles played by a specific American invention: the world's first automatic weapon. Arguing that its power to subdue crowds was due more to its cultural status than its actual use, I examine the paradox presented by a weapon like the Gatling gun and its depiction in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee: that its elegant appearance and functionality, as well as the latency of the threat it posed, was a power that operated by taking advantage of aesthetic perception. The project's final chapter investigates the poetry and prose of Ezra Pound and Mina Loy for the enthusiasm it registers for, as Pound phrased it, "Machine Art." I argue that the formal invention that drove modernism cannot be divorced from the prominence of mechanical invention that American industry made prominent through the turn of the century.