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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