In commencing the study of the style of Moby Dick, the student is confronted with several questions. Most important, perhaps, is the question of how much the style has contributed to the importance of the book, to the great adulation accorded it by many critics during the last quarter century. Did Melville’s peculiar ways of expressing his ideas have some particularly timely appeal to the post-WWI Generation? It is a highly mannered style, unique as that of Tristram Shandy. Yet while Sterne’s book was greatly enjoyed by the author’s contemporaries, Moby-Dick aroused very little contemporary interest. Was the style of the book a barrier to its appreciation by earlier readers? A great deal of Moby-Dick criticism is highly subjective. It is often difficult to find a basis for it in the text, which frequently seems merely to have afforded a spring-board for creative thinking on the part of the critic. The imagery and the symbolism are stretched to include concepts that appear remote from the author’s words. How much is the style responsible for this accretion of mystical thinking upon the text? Opinions are extreme as to the ultimate position of Moby-Dick among the landmarks of literature. Some critics rate it with Shakespeare and the Bible; some view it as a monstrosity. While this happens to some degree to most works which are finally accepted as literary masterpieces, how much is the divergence among Moby-Dick critics intensified because the style of the book has caused difficulties of interpretation? To answer such questions demands first a definition of style as it is to be applied to Moby-Dick. What is style? What constitutes “good” style? How far can an individual author be judged by such set canons? Based upon this there should follow an objective description of the style of the book, its form, its language, its imagery. How does Melville use words? How does he put together his sentences? What over-all design does he employ, and how does he relate the parts to the whole? Such an analysis can be better understood if the source of certain stylistic peculiarities is considered. Melville, like many English-speaking authors, owes a great debt to the Bible and to Shakespeare. How was his use of these sources peculiar to himself? What other important sources are apparent in his work? Finally, a review should be presented of various critical opinions of Melville’s style. Upon what are these evaluations based? How far is the critic interpreting Melville, and how far is he riding a hobby horse of his own?

No description available.

N/A / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

<p> The northwestern Melville Peninsula in the area of 69°34'N/84°50'W consists of Precambrian Shield rocks that have suffered multiple metamorphic events, including a high grade metamorphic event in the late Archean, ranging from upper amphibolite to granulite grade locally. The oldest unit present is a tonalite-granodiorite-granite suite showing both foliation and lineation and a somewhat migmatic texture. This biotite-hornblende orthogneiss has produced a Rb-Sr whole rock age date of 2.55 +/- 0.2 Ga. Field relationships indicate that this is a metamorphically induced age rather than an emplacement age. A coarse grained granitic pegmatite associated with the orthogneiss has produced a Rb-Sr isochron indicating an age of 1.83 +/- 0.06 Ga. Petrographic and field evidence indicate that this represents the emplacement age of the pegmatite. </p> / Thesis / Bachelor of Science (BSc)

No description available.

The following essay discusses Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” (1856) as a text that engages architecture and writing as interrelated systems of signification. Fueled by a variety of historical developments, domestic architecture emerges as a powerful purveyor of meaning in the antebellum decades. Architecture, in this cultural context, is construed in analogy to writing (and, to some extent, vice versa), as creating houses-as-texts that tell stories about their inhabitants in terms of their individual, familial, and national identities. Thus conceived, domestic architecture is characteristically enlisted in the articulation and stabilization of hegemonic narratives of, e. g., gender and nationhood. Melville’s text invokes this cultural convention to cast the signifying function that architecture and writing perform as being vulnerable and in crisis. This crisis is narrated by an idiosyncratic narrator for whom the semiotic instability documented by his narrative resonates with the social and cultural vulnerability that he experiences—his authority as master of his house and family is challenged in the course of the tale, along with the structural integrity of his chimney with which he wants to symbolically reinforce his authority. I argue that this crisis of signification performs double work in the text. On the one hand, it serves to articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline. On the other hand, allegedly dysfunctional signification unfolds a critical potential, bringing to light things which ‘functional’ signification had worked to conceal and thereby unlocking hermetic narratives of self, family, and nation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2005. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-238).

An understanding of the influence of Shakespeare on the structure and language of Moby-Dick is important because the plays of Shakespeare gave Melville a sudden insight into the significance of form and because his absorption of Shakespearean rhetoric enabled him to solve a serious artistic problem. In Moby-Dick Melville wished to write a work of symbolic fiction which would have both epic scope and tragic depth, but his difficulty lay in finding a structural and stylistic method which would provide the amplitude necessary to epic and at the same time could achieve the compression and verbal economy necessary to tragedy. He solved this problem by learning from Shakespeare to create a multi-layered dramatic structure and to use a dramatic language which becomes one layer of that structure. In Shakespeare's greatest plays there is a virtual fusion of form and meaning, and it is this fusion which, in its greatest moments, the language of Moby-Dick achieves.

The following essay discusses Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” (1856) as a text that engages architecture and writing as interrelated systems of signification. Fueled by a variety of historical developments, domestic architecture emerges as a powerful purveyor of meaning in the antebellum decades. Architecture, in this cultural context, is construed in analogy to writing (and, to some extent, vice versa), as creating houses-as-texts that tell stories about their inhabitants in terms of their individual, familial, and national identities. Thus conceived, domestic architecture is characteristically enlisted in the articulation and stabilization of hegemonic narratives of, e. g., gender and nationhood. Melville’s text invokes this cultural convention to cast the signifying function that architecture and writing perform as being vulnerable and in crisis. This crisis is narrated by an idiosyncratic narrator for whom the semiotic instability documented by his narrative resonates with the social and cultural vulnerability that he experiences—his authority as master of his house and family is challenged in the course of the tale, along with the structural integrity of his chimney with which he wants to symbolically reinforce his authority. I argue that this crisis of signification performs double work in the text. On the one hand, it serves to articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline. On the other hand, allegedly dysfunctional signification unfolds a critical potential, bringing to light things which ‘functional’ signification had worked to conceal and thereby unlocking hermetic narratives of self, family, and nation.

Nightclubs and restaurant bars have become major sources of noise pollution particularly in areas close to residential dwellings. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of noise emanating from nightclubs and restaurant bars on the community of Melville, Johannesburg. This study followed both qualitative and quantitative research methods. A total of 100 respondents were randomly sampled within the study area. Qualitative data was collected using a structured questionnaire. A calibrated sound level meter was used to measure environmental noise levels at 10 different measuring points. The research finding revealed that about:  87% of noise levels measured with the sound level meter did not comply with officially acceptable levels of 40dB at night.  69% of respondents indicated that the main source of noise is pollution is nightclubs.  78% of respondents described noise as annoying, disturbing and unwanted.  57% of respondents indicated that members of their household have suffered from sleeping disorders due to noise activities at night disrupting their sleep patterns and resulting in irritability and fatigue. The noise measurements were taken on weekends and public holidays during the day from 10h00 to 14h30 and at night from 22h00 to 02h30. The research findings revealed that the residents of Melville experienced high level of noise at night with nightclub as major source of noise and as a result the majority of the sampled population complained about irritability, fatigue and sleeping disorders due to exposure to noise. The outcome of this research indicated the need of health education on the adverse effects of noise pollution and the need of sound insulation at places of entertainment. Implementation of a noise management policy is needed in order to effectively control and manage the noise pollution in its area of jurisdiction and regular noise level monitoring by constantly taking noise measurements by law enforcements officers. / Department of Environmental Sciences / M. Sc. (Environmental Management)