A study of any one of Herman Melville’s works is bound to be a fascinating and informative venture. Within the products of his prolific writing career are keen, precise, enlightening observations about nineteenth-century America. Religion, politics, business, literature, and philosophy are all within the realm of Melville’s careful consideration. Melville was a man who reacted to his world with intense curiosity and passion. Melville was also extremely introspective – searching, questioning, and examining himself with equal intensity. “Bartleby the Scrivener” offers an interesting synthesis of Melville’s double vision. Within the confines of this tale are Melville’s reaction to his world and his reaction to himself. The purpose of this study is to examine the kaleidoscopic perspective of Melville, the complexity of his world and mind. Examining Bartleby as a simple man, a superman, and the artist in society acknowledges the complexity of Melville’s mind and art and furthers understanding of this particular story, Melville’s others works and Melville himself. Most scholarly considerations of “Bartleby” have centered on one perspective to the exclusion of all others; to do so is a violation of Melville’s purpose, plan and message. Bartleby is, first of all, considered as a simple man, a fictitious character in a story in relation to other fictitious characters. At this level it is possible to understand how Melville used the basic elements of fiction in his story to show the broad literary motifs with which he was concerned. Within the second level of consideration Bartleby is seen as one of Melville’s supermen, a man who by virtue of his tragic vision, isolated existence, and nonmaterialistic mindset rises above the superficiality, pettiness, and mundane nature of the common man. At the third and final level Bartleby is considered as the artist in society. The autobiographical element in this consideration is extensive. Melville depicts the plight of himself and all creative individuals in modern capitalistic societies, contending that the artist is partially responsible for the intellectual salvation of the common man. The artist’s purpose or quest is to enlighten the understanding of simple men, to help them see the complexity and darkness of reality. Such enlightenment makes supermen out of simple men. An examination of “Bartleby” at these three levels provides an extensive but not exhaustive analysis of Melville’s story. There are finer shades of meaning and more intricate nuances of thought within the story. The purpose of considering Bartleby as simple man, superman, and artist is to understand the processes of Melville’s mind, the essentials of his thought, and the recurrent patterns of imagery and allusions in his literature. It is to identify the most essential specific themes and ideas in the story and to minimize its complexity and obscurity without sacrificing the richness and depth of Melville’s thought. The study is an attempt to understand and meet Melville as far as possible on his own terms.

To illustrate Melville’s navigation of editorial politics in the periodical marketplace, this study analyzes two stories Melville published in Putnam’s in order to reconstruct the particular historical, editorial, social, and political contexts of these writings. The first text examined in this study is “Bartleby,” published in Putnam’s in November and December of 1853. This reading recovers overtures of sociability and indexes formal appropriations of established popular genres in order to develop an interpretive framework. Throughout this analysis, an examination of the narrator’s ideological bearings in relation to the unsystematic implementation of these ideologies in American public life sets forth a set of interrelated social and political contexts. Melville’s navigation of these contexts demonstrates specific compositional maneuverings in order to tend to the expectations of a popular readership but also to challenge ideological norms. Israel Potter, Herman Melville’s eighth book-length novel, serialized in Putnam’s from July of 1854 to March of 1855, is the focus of the second case study. This study tracks Melville’s engagements and disengagements with a variety of source materials and positions these compositional shifts amid contemporaneous political ideologies, populist histories, middle-class values, audience expectations, and editorial politics. This study will demonstrate that Melville set out to craft texts for a popular readership; however, Melville, struggling to recuperate his damaged credentials, seasoned by demoralizing business dealings, his ambitions attenuated by the realities of the literary marketplace, undertook the hard task of self-editing his works to satisfy his aspirations, circumvent editorial politics, and meet audience expectations.

The failure of identity in The Confidence-Man has confounded readers since its publication. To some critics, Melville's titular character has seemed to leave his readers in a hopelessness without access to confidence, identity, trust, ethical relationality, and, finally, without anything to say. I argue, however, that Melville's text does not leave us without hope. My argument, consequently, is inextricably bound to a reading of Melville's text as deeply engaged with the concepts it inherits from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, an inheritance woefully under-examined by those critics who would leave Melville's text in the mire of hopelessness. In examining how these two texts bind themselves together while simultaneously cutting against each other, my reading finds in The Confidence-Man an alternative way of responsibly living, one that eschews the fatal task of shoring up either our confidence or our embarrassment in favor of an inauthentic redeployment of identity that laughs at both the embarrassment in our confidence and the confidence in our embarrassment.

A perceived opposition between 'culture' and 'nature', presented as a dominant, biased and antagonistic relationship, is engrained in the language of Western culture. This opposition is reflected in, and adversely influences, our treatment of the ecosphere. I argue that through the study of literature, we can deconstruct this opposition and that such an ‘ecocritical’ operation is imperative if we are to avoid environmental catastrophe. I examine the way language influences our relationship with the world and trace the historical conception of ‘nature’ and its influence on the English language. The whale is, for many people, an important symbol of the natural world, and human interaction with these animals is an indication of our attitudes to the natural world in general. By focusing on whale texts (including older narratives, whaling books, novels and other whale-related texts), I explore the portrayal of whales and the natural world. Lastly, I suggest that Schopenhaurean thought, which has affinities in Moby-Dick, offers a cogent approach to ecocritically reading literature.

<p>In 1942, Algerian writer Albert Camus published a philosophical essay called The Myth of Sisyphus along with a fictional counterpart, The Stranger, wherein he presumed the human condition to be an absurd one. This, Camus claimed, was the result of the absence of a god, and consequently of any meaning beyond life itself. Without a god, without an entity greater than man, man has no higher purpose than himself and he himself is inevitably transient. As such, man, so long as he lives, is cursed with the inability to create or partake in anything lasting. The absurd is life without a tomorrow, a life of futility. As one of the main precursors of this view of life and of the human experience, Camus mentioned Herman Melville and Captain Ahab’s chase for the white whale - Moby Dick.</p><p>Now, as will be indicated in the following, the most common critical position holds that the white whale of Moby-Dick, Melville’s magnum opus, is to be interpreted as a symbol of God, and thus Ahab’s chase is tragic by virtue of its impossibility for success. As such, the tragedy is entailed by the futility vis-à-vis its impermanence. However, the ambiguity of Moby-Dick allows for the possibility of several alternative interpretations as to the role of the whale: for instance that of the devil, evil incarnate or merely a "dumb brute". As such, Ahab’s quest might as well be the pursuit of a creature which understands nothing of vengeance, thus rendering his objective equally, if not more fruitless, than the pursuit of a god.</p>

In 1942, Algerian writer Albert Camus published a philosophical essay called The Myth of Sisyphus along with a fictional counterpart, The Stranger, wherein he presumed the human condition to be an absurd one. This, Camus claimed, was the result of the absence of a god, and consequently of any meaning beyond life itself. Without a god, without an entity greater than man, man has no higher purpose than himself and he himself is inevitably transient. As such, man, so long as he lives, is cursed with the inability to create or partake in anything lasting. The absurd is life without a tomorrow, a life of futility. As one of the main precursors of this view of life and of the human experience, Camus mentioned Herman Melville and Captain Ahab’s chase for the white whale - Moby Dick. Now, as will be indicated in the following, the most common critical position holds that the white whale of Moby-Dick, Melville’s magnum opus, is to be interpreted as a symbol of God, and thus Ahab’s chase is tragic by virtue of its impossibility for success. As such, the tragedy is entailed by the futility vis-à-vis its impermanence. However, the ambiguity of Moby-Dick allows for the possibility of several alternative interpretations as to the role of the whale: for instance that of the devil, evil incarnate or merely a "dumb brute". As such, Ahab’s quest might as well be the pursuit of a creature which understands nothing of vengeance, thus rendering his objective equally, if not more fruitless, than the pursuit of a god.

This dissertation is based on the observation that Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" has become a popular reference in contemporary culture. Not only in the field of literary scholarship but also in the realm of art, political theory and philosophy, it is employed as an example of authentic resistance to power, a counter-intuitive politics that finds its strength in withdrawal, inaction, and inscrutability. The thesis examines the reasons and motives that drive literary scholars, artists and philosophers to read, interpret and use the story in such a way. It does so by analyzing the nature of and reoccurring patterns in Bartleby Industry, the enormous bulk of academic scholarship devoted to the story. It observes how the story is made use of outside of literary scholarship by disciplines, such as art and philosophy, that are not primarily concerned with the literary complexity of the story but use it to work on their own problems of politics and ethics. It pays special attention to its popularity among influential Postmarxist philosophers, namely Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. As the presence of "Bartleby" in the realm of philosophy has to do with a particular function literature performs in that field, in these chapters "Bartleby" becomes more of a guiding thread in order to...

I hold that Melvillean society consists of paradoxical relationships between civilization and barbarianism, evil and good, the corrupt and the natural, the individual and the collective, and the primitive and the advanced. Because these terms are arbitrary and, in the context of the novels, somewhat interchangeable, I explore Melville's thoughts as those emerge in the following groups of novels: Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket demonstrate the paradox of Melvillean society; Redburn, Moby-Dick, and Mardi illustrate the corrupting effects of capitalism and individualism; and The Confidence-Man, Israel Potter, and Pierre depict a collapsed paradox and the disintegration of Melville's society.

This thesis explores the role of Euromerican maritime tattoos in Herman Melville’s early sea fiction. Through layers of historic and scholarly obfuscation, Euromerican maritime tattoos have been delimited to a marginal role in the cosmopolitan shipboard culture of 19th-century Pacific whaling and trade networks. This project extracts and contextualizes that cultural practice as formative in the creation of sailors’ hybrid embodied identities. With this intervention in mind, Euromerican maritime tattooing emerges as a small but important feature in Melville’s first six books. Probing issues such as race, class, slavery, and colonialism, this project deploys an intimate reading practice, which seeks to engage Melville from within the text. Tattoos serve as a symbol by which he grapples with larger social formations. Through prolonged engagement with marked bodies, Melville unfurls a cast of characters who demonstrate how identity is shaped by the various domineering axes of modernization. He also reveals how a series of interconnected and somewhat autobiographical first-person narrators strive to find embodied alternatives to the violent forms of exploitation alive in the colonial Pacific and interconnected 19th-century global shipping networks. Ultimately, this project seeks to think, feel, and read alongside Melville to gain insight into how he made sense of the world. Through the lens of tattoos in his early sea fiction, Melville reveals the power of interrelation, the human potential to defy subjugation, and charts a path toward new social embodiments. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, United States Space Force, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

[pt] A presente dissertação tem como objetivo investigar a historicidade da forma literária de Moby Dick. Pretende-se examinar como epopeia e tragédia atuam como princípios organizadores do enredo, orientando também as discussões temáticas presentes na obra, que envolvem tradições intelectuais e religiosas diversas, tais como o puritanismo e a filosofia iluminista. Também será analisada a forma pela qual o autor problematiza a identidade estadunidense, ao apresentar, tanto em Ahab quanto em Ishmael, alternativas à tradicional imagem do herói americano, marcado por uma inocência pré-lapsariana, tal como elaborada, p. ex., nos ensaios do filósofo trancendentalista Ralph Waldo Emerson. Se a tragédia aparece no romance, por meio de um diálogo constante com as peças de Shakespeare, conservando suas características fundamentais, a epopeia, ligada ao discurso de Ishmael e à descrição dos selvagens no navio, se manifestaria de forma mais difusa, relacionada à tentativa de um resgate de um sentimento de totalidade da vida perdido na modernidade, e articulada a outros tipos de discurso, especialmente à enciclopédia e à forma do ensaio. / [en] This dissertation intends on investigating the historicity of the literary form of Moby Dick, by examining how epic and tragedy act as plot-organizing principles and coordinate the thematic discussions in the book, which involve diverse intellectual and religious traditions, like puritanism and the enlightment philosophy. It also analyzes how the auctor raises questions regarding a national American identity, as he presents, both in Ahab and Ishmael, alternatives to the traditional image of the american hero characterized by a pre-lapsarian innocence, as described in the essays of the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. If tragedy manifests itself in the novel mantaining its essential features through a dialogue with the plays of Shakespeare, the epic, which relates to Ishmael s speech and the description of the savage characters aboard the ship, does it on more subtle and diffuse ways, which are related to an attempt to restore a feeling of totality in life that was lost in modernity. It also appears articulated to other types of speech, especially the encyclopaedic discourse and the form of the essay.