Posts Tagged Melville
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January 28, 2010 by Cyrus Patell
Manic Monday
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. [...]Archive
October 22, 2009 by Cyrus Patell
NYUAD Institute Talk
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 [...]Archive
October 20, 2009 by Cyrus Patell
Sharjah
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, [...]Archive
February 3, 2009 by Cyrus Patell
The Melville Principle
In recent years, I’ve been arguing that Melville’s Moby-Dick dramatizes the benefits of cosmopolitanism — as well as some of the obstacles to its realization. So I was pleased to discover that the political scientist Aristide Zolberg wraps up his study A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (2006) with a [...]Archive
January 31, 2009 by Cyrus Patell
Is Ahab, Ahab?
One of the questions that arises in the course of Melville’s Moby-Dick is whether Ahab’s name is significant. It’s not just a matter of literary symbolism, in which the author is sending a signal to the knowing reader that the the reader might glean something about the character from the name. That’s standard practice in [...]Archive
September 17, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Evil, Choice and Rationalism
The subjects of my second Con West class on Zoroastrianism are going to be Zoroastrianism’s approach to the problem of evil and its stress on the importance of free choice. I’ll most likely be using excerpts from the Gathas (included in the Zoroastrian liturgy known as the Yasna) to illustrate these points. I’ll probably also [...]Archive
September 10, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
The Playlist So Far
Some years ago I began to play songs before each of my American Literature I lectures. I was teaching on the eighth floor of NYU’s Main Building (now the Silver Center), a building that wasn’t really designed for the number of students that flooded into and out of it at the beginning of each class [...]Archive
September 9, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Moby-Dick Looming
Before Monday’s lecture, the instructor who teaches in my room during the previous time slot asked me what songs I’d be playing. “Songs with ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the title,” I replied. “Oooh, we don’t like cosmopolitanism,” she said, going on to explain that she and her teaching assistants were all classicists, and they felt that cosmopolitanism [...]Archive
September 2, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
