Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1952. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 485-499).

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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.

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Este trabalho é de natureza teórica e estuda a obra Moby-Dick, de Herman Melville, à luz da filosofia antimetafísica de Friedrich Nietzsche, mais especificamente como está concretizada em Sobre verdade e mentira em sentido extramoral e Crepúsculo dos ídolos. Demonstra-se que as indagações de fundo ontológico presentes na obra de Melville encontram resposta parcial na noção de impossibilidade metafísica do pensador alemão. Para tal demonstração, recorre-se, em primeiro lugar, a uma sistematização do pensamento de Nietzsche e, em segundo, a uma abordagem interpretativa e compreensiva do texto de Melville, acentuada por meio do diálogo com a filosofia do próprio Nietzsche e, alternativamente, de Heidegger. Em conformidade com Iser, a compreensão dos sentidos do texto literário aqui estudado é realizada pelo trabalho de interpretação e estabelecimento de sentidos perpetrado pelo leitor, seja na fixação do que está claramente dado no texto, seja na busca dos sentidos lacunares, não claramente formulados e verbalizados. / This is a theoretical work on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and its relation with the anti-metaphysical philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as found especially in Twilight of the Idols and On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. It is shown that the ontological nature of Moby-Dick, the novel, finds a partial answer in the notion of metaphysical impossibility developed by the German philosopher. In order to accomplish this goal, a systematization of Nietzsche’s thought was made, so that an interpretative approach of the literary text could be carried out emphasizing a dialogue with his philosophy, and, alternatively, Heidegger’s. In compliance with Iser, this study takes into consideration the fact that comprehension is achieved through interpretation and what the reader is able to perceive in the literary text, either reinforcing what is already given there, or searching for what is unformulated and non-verbalized in it.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2005. / Principal faculty advisor: J.A. Leo Lemay, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

Este trabalho é de natureza teórica e estuda a obra Moby-Dick, de Herman Melville, à luz da filosofia antimetafísica de Friedrich Nietzsche, mais especificamente como está concretizada em Sobre verdade e mentira em sentido extramoral e Crepúsculo dos ídolos. Demonstra-se que as indagações de fundo ontológico presentes na obra de Melville encontram resposta parcial na noção de impossibilidade metafísica do pensador alemão. Para tal demonstração, recorre-se, em primeiro lugar, a uma sistematização do pensamento de Nietzsche e, em segundo, a uma abordagem interpretativa e compreensiva do texto de Melville, acentuada por meio do diálogo com a filosofia do próprio Nietzsche e, alternativamente, de Heidegger. Em conformidade com Iser, a compreensão dos sentidos do texto literário aqui estudado é realizada pelo trabalho de interpretação e estabelecimento de sentidos perpetrado pelo leitor, seja na fixação do que está claramente dado no texto, seja na busca dos sentidos lacunares, não claramente formulados e verbalizados. / This is a theoretical work on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and its relation with the anti-metaphysical philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as found especially in Twilight of the Idols and On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. It is shown that the ontological nature of Moby-Dick, the novel, finds a partial answer in the notion of metaphysical impossibility developed by the German philosopher. In order to accomplish this goal, a systematization of Nietzsche’s thought was made, so that an interpretative approach of the literary text could be carried out emphasizing a dialogue with his philosophy, and, alternatively, Heidegger’s. In compliance with Iser, this study takes into consideration the fact that comprehension is achieved through interpretation and what the reader is able to perceive in the literary text, either reinforcing what is already given there, or searching for what is unformulated and non-verbalized in it.

Este trabalho é de natureza teórica e estuda a obra Moby-Dick, de Herman Melville, à luz da filosofia antimetafísica de Friedrich Nietzsche, mais especificamente como está concretizada em Sobre verdade e mentira em sentido extramoral e Crepúsculo dos ídolos. Demonstra-se que as indagações de fundo ontológico presentes na obra de Melville encontram resposta parcial na noção de impossibilidade metafísica do pensador alemão. Para tal demonstração, recorre-se, em primeiro lugar, a uma sistematização do pensamento de Nietzsche e, em segundo, a uma abordagem interpretativa e compreensiva do texto de Melville, acentuada por meio do diálogo com a filosofia do próprio Nietzsche e, alternativamente, de Heidegger. Em conformidade com Iser, a compreensão dos sentidos do texto literário aqui estudado é realizada pelo trabalho de interpretação e estabelecimento de sentidos perpetrado pelo leitor, seja na fixação do que está claramente dado no texto, seja na busca dos sentidos lacunares, não claramente formulados e verbalizados. / This is a theoretical work on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and its relation with the anti-metaphysical philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as found especially in Twilight of the Idols and On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. It is shown that the ontological nature of Moby-Dick, the novel, finds a partial answer in the notion of metaphysical impossibility developed by the German philosopher. In order to accomplish this goal, a systematization of Nietzsche’s thought was made, so that an interpretative approach of the literary text could be carried out emphasizing a dialogue with his philosophy, and, alternatively, Heidegger’s. In compliance with Iser, this study takes into consideration the fact that comprehension is achieved through interpretation and what the reader is able to perceive in the literary text, either reinforcing what is already given there, or searching for what is unformulated and non-verbalized in it.

Any text which criticizes, undermines and/or transforms the encyclopaedic ideal of ordering and textualizing the world in a closed, linear fashion can be defined as a post-encyclopaedic text. This thesis explores both theoretical and artistic texts which inhabit the realm of post-encyclopaedism. In the past, critical speculation on encyclopaedism in literature has been concerned with the ways in which artistic texts attempt to live up to the encyclopaedic ideal. In some cases, this effort to establish an identity between the artistic text and the encyclopaedia has led to an ignorance of the disruptive or even deconstructive effects of so-called fictional encyclopaedias. Once we recognize the existence of such effects, we must begin to examine the techniques and possibilities of post-encyclopaedism. Hence we can see post-encyclopaedic qualities in the condensed meta-encyclopaedism of Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", the disrupted quests for encyclopaedic revelation in Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and the principle of textualized world as fugue in Louis Zukofsky's "A"-12. In addition, we can create a theoretical space for the post-encyclopaedic text by weaving together Mikhail Bakhtin'sideas on the novel as opposed to the epic, Michel Foucault's notion of restructuring the closed circle of the text through mirrored writing, Jurij Lotman's theory of internal and external recoding in texts, and Umberto Eco's concept of the open text. By combining an investigation of theoretical and artistic texts which lend themselves to post-encyclopaedism, we can create a generic distinction between texts which attempt to be encyclopaedic in themselves: and texts which disrupt and/or transform the encyclopaedic ideal / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation argues that Anglophone writers across the nineteenth-century Atlantic World can be seen trying to represent specific natural worlds as intentionally produced by the cultural practices of Indigenous or African Diasporic people. The case studies that support this argument include the work of Anne Wollstonecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Gilbert Wilson, and they respectively travel from the plantation worlds of Matanzas, Cuba amidst the island’s “sugar revolution,” New England river wetlands but especially the unrelenting persistence of swamps, desert island archipelagos in the Pacific just before the Guano Wars, and the upper Missouri River basin beds increasingly enclosed by United States military installations. Reading each writer’s representation of these natural and social worlds through the framework of ‘land management,’ this thesis proposes a way of registering and tracing their shared attempt to discern practices that all center around the reproduction of ‘natural variation.’ It contends that these nineteenth-century attempts to observe, speculate, or imagine instances of natural variation, each as a product of Indigenous or African Diasporic land management practices be read as a form of poetics, which this dissertation defines as the rhetorical appropriation and reconfiguration of previous modes of discourse (as opposed to an idea of raw innovation). Here, Wollstonecraft, Hawthorne, Melville, and Wilson each renegotiate the colonial justification narrative, official orders of natural history, the perspective of the travel log, and early ethnographic anthropology, in order to represent myriad relationships between natural resilience and subaltern ‘survivance,’ the convergence of which this dissertation ultimately names ‘endurance.’ Finally, we might think of each renegotiation as itself a form of ‘management’ by which these writers respectively highlight their understanding of literature’s role in empire, but do so, in the hopes of rerouting this relay so that representations of nature come to include the role of cultural practices of land management. This archive of ‘endurance’ might be read, then, as the result of disparate authors who all nevertheless believe that literary work might actually help restore and sustain cultural and environmental realities.