Conventional literary representations of disability reflect and re-inscribe the fraudulent assumption that individuals with impairments are mysterious 'others,' subhuman betrayers of the divinely-sanctioned corporeal norm. When such normative 'myths' are internalized by a social body, the culturally-determined 'disabled' minority is subjected to various forms of oppression and degradation, stigmatizing efforts designed to strip the 'deviants' of agency and dignity. The object ofthis study is to isolate and, subsequently, demythologize the presuppositions ordering such conventional disability myths. This 'demythologizing' effort is patterned, in large part, on the theoretical tenets espoused by Roland Barthes in his influential text Mythologies. Barthes's text, in its emphasis on destabilizing culturally-fixed 'truths,' provides the theoretical framework necessary for gauging the socio-political load of disability myth. In an effort to illumine, moreover, the presence and workings of disability myth in nineteenth and twentieth century Western consciousness, I examine the specific portraits of disability that appear in Herman Melville'sMoby-Dick; Melville's canonized text lends itself particularly well to this type of investigation as its characters -Ahab and Pip, in particular - are representative of the spectrum of negative disability imagery. This critical exercise, in its emphasis on displacing and, thus, de-naturalizing mythic representations of 'normal' and 'abnormal' corporeality, resembles and reinforces the efforts of the Disability Movement and its attempts to restore power and dignity to the unjustly disenfranchised 'disabled' minority. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis considers Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as a textual strategy of possible, alternative models of reading, as well as a text in itself. I approach the text as a drama of interpretations and argue that the individual consciousnesses of different interpreters represent different interpretive strategies, and that these differences suggest distinct structures of community. This approach becomes more focussed in the discussion of Ahab and Ishmael as representatives of two contrasting interpretive possibilities, of "reading" the text as a "pasteboard mask" which conceals a stable identity and single "truth," versus "reading" the text of the "defaced" and hence indeterminate surface of changing "meanings." Each strategy implies a different way of conceiving "space" as the "place" where community is formed, and though critics frequently perceive the ending of Moby-Dick as a paradoxical conflict between these two visionary quests, I suggest that Ishmael's survival presents a possible resolution, where Moby Dick becomes the narrative of filling space with many narratives to create the text Moby-Dick.

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

For close to a decade, I have weighed comparative approaches to "the Great American Novel". Progress increased as soon as I resolved on selecting Moby-Dick as the work originally responsible for issuing that slogan. Making this particular selection required the application of a dynamic concept which, appropriately, reflects critiques of knowledge production: "the Archive". Perhaps the most direct references to a conceptual archive appear in Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, which addresses the dual forces "preservation/destruction" that influence allegory and mythology. Other critical writers refer to a similar concept through various other terms, ultimately equipping my thesis with a method for studying the relation between myth and allegory. The method draws from each writer's focus on the form and content dynamics of artifacts, and how these dynamics reflect the historical conditions that affirm or produce them. Specifically, all the writers I have selected to study, in some way consider the play between the mechanical apparatus and the representation it produces. Thus, I concluded that my literary comparative approach could involve juxtaposing a different, historically concurrent mode of documentation: film media and photography. Gravity's Rainbow is often considered, after Moby-Dick, the most universally-recognized "Great American Novel". Pynchon spends a lot of time referring to mass-produced films, their effects on the global order emerging with WWII, and to the material occurrence of film technology as it relates to the book as a material artifact. For Pynchon, the backlots built up by such "great" as D.W. Griffith constitute the twentieth-century frontier. / Master of Arts

Many critics not satisfied with explaining Moby-Dick in terms of the novel, have sough analogies in other literary genres. Most often parallels have been drawn from epic and dramatic literature. Critics have called Moby-Dick either an epic or a tragedy. After examining the evidence presented by both schools of thought, after establishing a workable definition of the epic and listing the most common epic devices, and after examining Moby-Dick in terms of this definition and discovering many of the epic devices in it, I propose the thesis that Melville has written an epic, not unlike the great epics of the past.

Die Arbeit unternimmt den Versuch, Melvilles Moby-Dick als einen Vorboten postmoderner Literarizität in den Blick zu nehmen, der in seiner Autoreferentialität den eigenen textuellen Status kritisch-ironisierend reflektiert und Sprache als einen krisenhaften Zugang zu Welt und Kosmos ins Spiel bringt. Sie legt dar, dass Melvilles opus magnum ein im Verlaufe der abendländischen Philosophie epistemologisch und semiologisch virulent gewordenes Krisenbewusstsein vom "Phantasma der Umfassung der Wirklichkeit" (Lyotard) einerseits auf inhaltlicher und andererseits autoreferentiell auf der Ebene der écriture inszeniert. Entsprechend wird davon ausgegangen, dass die vom Text absorbierten Diskurse in ihrer schieren Vielzahl nicht als partikulare Bezüge hermeneutisch isoliert werden können, sondern stattdessen in ihrer Heterogenität selbst die zentrale Problematik illustrieren, in deren Dienst sie als konstitutive Elemente stehen: Statt positiven Sinn zu stiften, verunmöglichen sie jegliche interpretatorische Direktive und verweisen dadurch auf eine dem Roman inhärente negative Dimension von Sinn – sie sind also vielmehr Bestandteile eines verhandelten Problems als dessen Lösung. Nicht nur in den cetologischen Abschnitten des Romans – gleichwohl dort am offenkundigsten – lässt sich Melvilles spielerisch-dekonstruktiver Umgang mit westlichen Wissens- und Denkmodellen erkennen: Dringt man in ahabischer Manie(r) in das semantische Feld des Romans auf der Suche nach einem letzten Grund, einer inferentiellen Letztbegründung, gerät man in einen infiniten regressiven Strudel, der jede getroffene semantische Arretierung auf die Bedingungen ihrer Möglichkeit hin befragt und dadurch wieder aufbricht. Eine ishmaelische Lektüre des Moby-Dick bestünde darin, den Anspruch auf Letztbegründetheit im Sinne der différance Derridas aufzuschieben und sich damit der Gravitation eines transzendentalen Signifikats zu entziehen. Liest man die cetologischen Kapitel vor diesem Hintergrund, kann man in ihnen – so eine der zentralen Thesen der Arbeit – eine autoreferentielle Kontrastfolie erkennen, eine negative Exemplifikation dessen, wie sich der Moby-Dick nicht erfassen lässt: gewissermaßen eine Lektüreanleitung ex negativo. Wesentliche Merkmale der Melvilleschen écriture sind Ambivalenz, Parodie und Dialogizität. Er verwendet stilistische und motivische Versatzstücke, destruiert sie und unterläuft so permanent die Ernsthaftigkeit der den Roman strukturierenden Schicksalszeichen wie auch die interpretativen Anstrengungen des Lesers. Die Autorität des eigenen Diskurses wird ironisch unterminiert und der Text damit in einer Schwebe zwischen Parodie und Monomanie, Unabschließbarkeit und Universalanspruch gehalten. Als die figurativen Kraftfelder dieser konkurrierenden Paradigmen stehen Ahab und Ishmael auf der Handlungsebene personifizierend für die paradoxe Konstellation des gesamten Textes, der nicht die Auflösung oder Aufhebung seiner konfliktiven Elemente sucht, sondern als ästhetischer Ausdruck des Paradoxen feste Orientierungspunkt vorenthält. Anstatt beide Figuren und die ihnen zugrundeliegenden epistemologischen Strategien antagonistisch in Opposition zueinander zu stellen, begreift diese Arbeit sie als komplementäre Elemente eines romantischen Metatextes, der sie in eine konfliktive Rezeption einfasst. In Analogie zum Konzept der romantischen Ironie Friedrich Schlegels wird Ahab hierbei als prototypischer Allegorisierer begriffen, wohingegen Ishmael als Ironiker für die Relativierung derartig monomanischer Kraftakte steht – zwischen Anspannung und Abspannung, Unbedingtem und Bedingtem baut sich jene Dynamik auf, die den gesamten Text durchwaltet. Im Sinne der romantischen Universalpoesie ist der Moby-Dick nicht auf einen systemischen Abschluss hin orientiert, sondern besteht auf/aus seiner Unabschließbarkeit: Heterogenität, Inkonsequenz, Verworrenheit und mitunter Unverständlichkeit sind demnach keine Folgen kompositorischer Nachlässigkeit, sondern in ihrer Gesamtheit als das performative Moment der eigentlichen Mitteilung zu begreifen.

Pequod - is an exploration of the translation problem. And an idea to examine the myth of"why the book is always better than the movie."The work began by choosing a character to interpret. My choice was the characteristicCaptain Ahab and his mono manic quest for revenge. The character is taken from HermanMenvilles classic novel "Moby Dick" or "The White wale" from 1851.In order to interpret the character differently, I picked out passages from the novel thatdirectly describes the first sight of the character. And also a paragraph describing thecharacter's inner thoughts and ideas about their environment.I did a survey of the descriptions with leading questions about the character's outfit,garments, materials, colours and accessories. I handle out the survey to 15 creative personsand asked them to interpret the character for me, but also make a quick sketch of him.The participants was totally unaware of witch character it was all about. / Program: Modedesignutbildningen

This project relies on two main bodies of work: the text and reception history of Moby-Dick. I argue that the novel’s prophetic insights unfold in its failure and resurrection. The reception history consists of early reviewers, biographers, and critics both hailing and discounting Moby-Dick’s literary value. The first section, “Proto-Modernist Melville: Specific Difficulty in Moby-Dick,” explores the peculiar difficulty inherent in the text of Moby-Dick, namely its divergent, evasive, and hieroglyphic properties. Chapter 2, “Reception: Nineteenth-Century Failure and Modernist Success,” chronicles the novel’s reception history, focusing largely on the critics of twentieth-century modernism. In “Moby-Dick as Prophetic Anticipation and Fulfillment,” I examine the link between the inherent difficulty found within Moby-Dick and its reception history. I propose that Melville’s novel theorizes its prophetic anticipation of literary modernism as well as Melville’s own authorial failure and redemption narrative.

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?