Tag Archives | Melville

Contributing

May 5, 2012

Scholars aspire to make “a contribution”: we seek to add to the already existing store of knowledge about a subject. In literary scholarship, new insights are often built on the insights of those who have gone before, and when it comes to classic texts like Melville’s Moby-Dick, the mass of previous scholarship is truly daunting. It’s hard to imagine that one might be able to contribute anything “new” to what we already know about a text like Melville’s.

So it’s particularly gratifying to discover that someone out there values something I had to say about my favorite novel. The article in question, “Cosmopolitanism and Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick,” appeared in recent volume from Ashgate Publishing entitled The Turn Around Religion in America, edited by Nan Goodman and Michael P. Kramer. The volume brings together work inspired by the scholarship of my dissertation advisor, Sacvan Bercovitch.

Here’s what the review in the May 1st issue of Choice had to say about the book:

More a festschrift dedicated to a distinguished scholar than a fully cohesive set of essays, this collection addresses Bercovitch’s characteristic themes during a long career at Columbia and, ultimately, Harvard. Best known for his work on Puritanism, Bercovitch has included all of American literature in his scope, and he is one of the vertebral forces behind recent revisionary conceptions of the field. The contributors to this volume are former students of Bercovitch and distinguished contemporaries such as Michael Colacurcio (who writes on Emerson). Receiving full treatment are typology and its millennial-Christian reading of Judaic biblical motifs; dissensus and its role in regulating American life while providing an aura of rebellion; Edward Taylor, brilliantly reconceived (by Shira Wolosky) as Hebraic; and Herman Melville and Nathanael West. Goodman (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) and Kramer (Univ. of Bar-Ilan, Israel) also include essays on Bercovitch’s work: e.g., Andrew DuBois’s masterful discussion of irony in Bercovitch’s writing. Further afield, Cyrus Patell on Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick and Giuseppe Nori on “process and continuity, genealogy and destiny” in the Romantic historiography are major contributions to scholarship. This reviewer cannot imagine the Americanist who will not need to refer to this book at least once in his/her career. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. — N. Birns, The New School

To become a “vertebral force” — now that’s an aspiration I’d never thought of before. But, actually, it’s a pretty good description of Saki’s contribution to literary scholarship and cultural studies.

Thanks again, Nan and Michael, for including me among the contributors. It was an honor to participate.

 

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Reframing American Literature I

February 2, 2010

Last year, on the eve of my lecture about Anne Hutchinson and Mary Rowlandson, I wrote a post over at PWHNY speculating about how I might change my American Literature I syllabus when I taught it in the spring of 2010:

It might be time to reframe the course. Rather than teaching The Puritan Origins of the American Self (the title of a classic account by Sacvan Bercovitch), I might instead teach the cosmopolitan origins of the American self, shifting the focus from Boston to New York.

Well, here it is, the spring of 2010, and I’ve done a modest bit of reframing, tinkering with the course rather than re-engineering it.

I spoke about cosmopolitanism and Barack Obama’s deliberative democracy on the first day, and I moved the land chapters of Moby-Dick up to the second lecture, so that the course is now framed by Melville’s novel. I used a brief account of Melville’s career to reinforce the idea of cosmopolitanism by describing the way in which Melville reverses both aspects of his own career as a whaler (having the Pequod sail west, when he sailed east) and the story of the wrecking of the Essex (having Ishmael encounter the cannibal first and then the whale). And I asked the question, Why does the novel’s “Loomings” chapter take place in Manhattan, suggesting that it is Melville’s way of aligning the narrative with what Tom Bender has called has called “the historic cosmopolitanism” of New York City.” (See Bender’s essay “New York as a Center of Difference” from The Unfinished City [2007]), one of the touchstones of our Writing New York course and an addition to this year’s American Literature I syllabus.)

But this week we’ve moved back to Boston: Bradford and Winthrop on Monday, Hutchinson and Rowlandson. Explicitly telling the story of the Puritans from the vantage point of New York — perhaps by beginning with an account of Hutchinson’s death in the Bronx — will have to wait for yet another iteration of the course. For now, the more modest reframing will have to do.

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Manic Monday

January 28, 2010

And not “just another” manic Monday. In fact, I can’t remember another day on which I’ve had to give three big public performances — and on different subjects to boot (though in my mind there are significant areas of overlap among them).

9:30 a.m. — First up, a Writing New York lecture on on E. B. White’s Here is New York, introducing the week’s theme of “History, Modernity, and Nostalgia.” In fact, the interplay among these three ideas will turn out to be a major area of exploration as the course unfolds, and Monday’s lecture serves as a kind of second overture for the course after the introductory lecture last week. I’ve described the lecture over at Patell and Waterman’s History of New York, and I did last year, I introduced the discussion by telling an anecdote about Hillary Rodham Clinton invocation of White’s book during her debate with Rick Lazio during the 2000 campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from New York.

2:00 p.m. — American Literature I, Lecture Two. Luckily, this lecture belongs to my comfort zone, because I decided this year to frame the course with Moby-Dick. So this lecture was an introduction to Melville’s life and writing and the opening sections of Moby-Dick. The students had been asked to read the “Etymology” and “Extracts” sections that open the book and the land chapters (1-22) to get their feet wet as it were. Lecturing about Moby-Dick has become a little bit like playing in my band used to be back in the day: I look forward to certain solos and riffs, but also to varying them in event.

6:30 p.m. — A panel on “Multiculturalism or Cosmopolitanism” for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute as part of a year-long series on “The Cosmopolitan Idea.” Sharing the stage with two of your intellectual heroes –  this case the intellectual historian David Hollinger (UC Berkeley) and the cultural critic Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois at Chicago) is bound to be a little bit … disconcerting. The two of them, in their different ways, hover over my recent work on emergent literatures in a kind of good cop-bad cop routine. (Guess which is which.) I offered a preview of the event PWHNY over the weekend, and later this week I’ll write about each of their talks individually (and maybe my own). Some video excerpts will eventually appear on the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute website. (You can see the entire first session in the series there now.)

Needless to say, my brain felt more than a little bruised come Tuesday morning.

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NYUAD Institute Talk

October 22, 2009

By all accounts, the lecture that I gave for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute on Wednesday night went well. The title of the talk was “Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism, and the Promise of Literature.” Like Joanna’s lecture on the Silk Road, it took place at the Al Mamoura Auditorium in the building that houses the Abu Dhabi Education Council, which is the group that serves as our sponsor in Abu Dhabi. Here’s the blurb that I’d given them about the lecture:

Originating in the idea of the world citizen and conceived in contradistinction to nationalism, cosmopolitanism can be understood as a way of building community by embracing rather than avoiding difference. This lecture will explore the ways in which a cosmopolitan perspective responds to problems posed by contemporary Western multiculturalism. It will also suggest that literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker.

In the lecture, which owes much to the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and David Hollinger, I tried to tie together a number of elements from my recent scholarship and thinking: the problems posed by overly pluralist conceptions of multiculturalism; the problems posed by the desire for “cultural purity,” the power of “emergent writing,” Zoroastrianism, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. In addition to serving as a way of tying together these strands, Moby-Dick was intended to offer a case study in the ways that a text can mobilize cosmopolitan perspectives and finally as an entree to the idea that “literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker.”

That idea is the least developed in my current work, but potentially the most intriguing. I wanted to get at the idea that great literature promotes a cosmopolitan embrace of difference because it often asks you to do precisely that: embrace a different consciousness than your own. In the case, for example, of reading a novel, what you do if you become immersed in it is to let the consciousness of another take over your own.

If you’re interested, you can download the script that formed the basis of the lecture here.

The talk was also accompanied by PowerPoint that I hoped would make the lecture a little more vivid by presenting images and also the block quotes that I was using. I confess that I was worried that I had included too much material about Moby-Dick, a text that I’d assumed my audience had heard of but not read. I tried to solve the problem by telling stories about the text and anecdotes related to the text (in particular, the sinking of the whaleship Essex in the South Seas and Melville’s reaction to reading Owen Chase’s account of it). I tried to survey the audience: only one or two seemed to be asleep, and I really couldn’t complain about that since I myself had succumbed to jet lag during my colleague Joanna’s talk: apparently at precisely the moment that she made a reference to Zoroastrianism! (Whoops!)

The question and answer session was gratifyingly lively and gave me many things to think about. Indeed, I expect to be meditating on some of these questions more here in the days to come.

I had a question from a colleague at Zayed University about language differences, translation, and whether cosmopolitan conversation was predicated on a shared language. I tried to suggest that language was yet another gulf that the cosmopolitan tried to cross by whatever means he or she could and that one of the opportunities presented by the present moment is the fact that texts were so quickly translated and disseminated. And I suggested that one of the goals of the NYUAD literature program would be to make students aware of both the limitations and opportunities accompany the translation of any text.

Another colleague from Zayed asked whether my suggestion that literature offers an opportunity for cosmopolitan experience was limited to texts that don’t themselves adopt a counter-cosmopolitan or fundamentalist attitude. I tried to suggest that in fact it would have been much more challenging to use exactly such a text as my case study, because I would like to be able to argue that even a counter-cosmopolitan text, insofar as it forces the reader to confront difference of perspective and consciousness, can encourage cosmopolitan thinking. And I talked a little about the way in which learning from the fundamentalist or from the provincial is the hardest thing for cosmopolitans to do today.

NYUAD Vice Chancellor Al Bloom gave me the opportunity to talk a little more about the interplay of sameness and difference, and I had the chance to talk a little about Anthony Appiah’s slogan version of cosmopolitanism — “universality plus difference” — which I’d chosen to omit from the lecture and about my take on the recent history of cosmopolitan theory, including ideas about “rooted cosmopolitanism.” I suggested that what can save  cosmopolitanism from being simply another Western idea imposed on everyone else is the idea that it is a “weak” conception of the good from a philosophical point of view. (Actually, in the event I didn’t use the phrase “W of the good” when responding; I wish I had.) It’s a structure, a container into which different ideas can be poured, so long as the ideas are compatible with the ideas of embracing difference and being willing to engage in dialogue across boundaries. A cosmopolitanism rooted in Abu Dhabi will have structural affinities with  cosmopolitanism rooted in New York, but also salient differences that enhance the cosmopolitan experience!

They put out a nice spread afterward, but I only had one nibble of it because so many people from the audience came up to ask questions and offer insights. I was particularly gratified to meet Alia Yunis, a novelist whose first book, The Night Counter, has been on my list of texts to add to read as part of my final revisions on the NYU Press book on emergent literatures. Now that I’ve met her, I’ve moved it to the top of my list. (She’ll be reading at the conference on the 1001 Nights that Philip Kennedy has organized for the NYUAD Institute this December. Check out her website and you’ll see why.)

With any luck, a number of  the people who said that they would e-mail me with further thoughts actually will! Meanwhile, i recorded the entire session and hopefully will have the courage to listen to the Q & A again soon. (You’re never quite as good as you thought you were when you listen to the actual tape!) I’d like to keep the conversation that I started at Al Mamoura going, even if only (for now) here in the ether.

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Sharjah

October 20, 2009

au_sharjah.jpg
Sharjah, which is right next to Dubai, is more conservative than its neighbor. No alcohol is served in the emirate, which was named the cultural capital of the Arab world by UNESCO because of its excellent museums. The American University of Sharjah there was founded by the emirate’s ruler, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohamed Al-Qassimi III, and it is a forerunner of NYUAD insofar as it is a school that offers a co-educational experience. The Shaikh also founded the more traditional University of Sharjah, which lies just down the road from AUS and offers separate but equal facilities for men and women.

At AUS we met with the Dean of Arts and Science, Williams Heidkamp, and with faculty from a variety of fields including literature, mass communication, history, and international relations. The overarching subject of our discussion was the challenge involved in teaching the humanities in an Islamic setting: where were certain intellectual and social lines drawn, what kinds of interaction between instructors and students were permissible outside the classroom, and where might the expectations of Western teachers and students from the Gulf region clash, what was it like to live in an emirate if you were an ex-pat? Instructors at  NYUAD will face many of the same challenges, though our student body is likely to be more demographically diverse than that of AUS. The AUS faculty members seemed skeptical both about our aspirations to import some of the residential education models that we use back at NYUNY and also more generally about the prospects for a liberal arts college in the Emirates. Their institution is dominated by its engineering school, apparently, which is the first-choice program for the majority of entering students. Arts and Science seems to get those who don’t find engineering congenial and who are able to convince their parents that a liberal arts curriculum is worthwhile. They wished us well, however, hoping that if NYUAD is successful, it will enhance the status of the liberal arts in the region generally and thereby help them. We expressed our hope that we would be able to establish scholarly ties with AUS and foster the creation of communities of scholars with mutual research interests.

sharjah_islamic_museum.jpgAfter lunch at  the school cafeteria, we headed over to Sharjah’s Museum of Islamic Civilization, a domed building with two long wings. I spent most of my time in the hall devoted to the history of Islam and found myself reminded of the very central role that Hagar and Ismail play in Islamic belief and more specifically in the hajj pilgrimage. And it made me worry just a little about the lecture on cosmopolitanism that I’d be giving the next day. The lecture’s second half uses Moby-Dick as a case study in the dynamics of literary cosmopolitanism, and I wondered whether any in my audience might find my treatment of “Ishmael” disturbing or insensitive. Perhaps more significantly, I began to think about the significance of Melville’s treatment of Islam in the novel, which draws on stereotype far more than his treatment of Zoroastrianism. (I’m thinking particularly of the episode involving Queequeg’s “Ramadan’” but also about offhand references to Islamic and Near Eastern practices througout the book. I started thinking that I should write companion piece to my essay on cosmopolitanism and Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick that would explore the novel’s appropriations of Islam as (I suspect) an example of the limits of its cosmopolitan aspirations.

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