Postmodern Ethics and Subject, Moby-Dick and Literary Criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 135-169
Author(s):  
A-young Son
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Postmodern Ethics

Moby-Dick and Compassion

2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Shape Representations ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nonhuman Species

AbstractBecause the notions of "anthropomorphism" and "sentimentality" often are used pejoratively to dismiss research in human-animal studies, there is much to be gained from ongoing and detailed analysis of the changing "structures of feeling" that shape representations and treatments of nonhuman animals. Literary criticism contributes to this project when it pays due attention to differences in historical and cultural contexts. As an example of this approach, a reading of the humanization of cetaceans in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick - and more broadly in nineteenth-century whaling discourse - demonstrates how radically human feelings for nonhuman species are affected by shifting material and ideological conditions.

scholarly journals Orientalism in Moby Dick

1987 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-125
Author(s):  
Rasha Al Disuqi
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Habits Of Mind ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Reflective Process ◽  
White Whale ◽  
Complete Section ◽  
Spring Balance

This article aims to correct some of the basic errors in Melvillian Islamiccriticism. One of the classics of Western literature is Herman Melville’s MobyDick. the allegorical story of one man’s pursuit of a great white whale.4 Likeall great novelists, Melville was struggling with the great moral issues thattranscend individuals and even civilizations. This contrasts with most ofmodem literature, which exhibits journalistic habits of mind and tends to dealin superficial analysis rather than with the reflective process that gives contentto meditation and thought.Modem literary criticism exhibits the same shallowness. George Orwellexplained the problem perhaps when he observed that applying the same standardsto such novelists as Dickens and Dostoyevsky and to most contemporarywriters is like weighing a flea on a spring-balance intended forelephants.” Critics, he added, don’t do this, because it would mean having tothrow out most of the books they get for review.The value of Melville’s work is that it is possessed of the moral imperativeand is designed to lead the forces of wisdom and balance against the spiritualbankruptcy and anarchy of the encroaching materialism in modem Westerncivilization.The tragedy of Melville’s work is the superficiality of its reliance onIslamic sources, which Melville had read but only in Orientalist distortion.This tragedy has been compounded by later generations of Orientalists whohave used the distortions of Melville to generate their own. Perhaps the mostinsidious of these latter-day Orientalists is Dorothy Finklestein, author ofMelville’s Oriendu, who we shall refer to simply as “the critic."Her study of Melville’s Islamic references devotes a complete section to“Muhammad and the Arabs” in the chapter on “Prophets and Conquerers.”Following this, she presents an exhaustive analysis of “Islamic Characters andSymbols.” She harshly rejects Melville’s immature resort to secondary Islamicsources; namely Carlyle’s Hero, Heroworship, and Heroic History, Goethe’s ...

Literature in Our Time, or, Loving Literature to Bits

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Callus
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Anne Michaels

In this essay Ivan Callus provides some reflections on literature in the present. He considers the tenability of the post-literary label and looks at works that might be posited as having some degree of countertextual affinity. The essay, while not setting itself up as a creative piece, deliberately structures itself unconventionally. It frames its argument within twenty-one sections that are self-contained but that also echo each other in their attempt to develop an overarching argument which draws out some of the challenges that lie before the countertextual and the post-literary. Punctuating the essay and contributing to its unconventional take on the practice of literary criticism is a series of exercises for the reader to complete, if so wished; the essay makes no attempt, however, to suggest that a countertextual criticism ought to make a routine of such devices. The separate sections contain reflections on a number of texts and writers, among them, and in order of appearance, Hamlet, Anthony Trollope, Jacques Derrida, The Time Machine, Don Quixote, Mark Z. Danielewski, Mark B. N. Hansen, Gunter Kress, Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, W. B. Yeats, Kate Tempest, David Jones, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tim Parks, Tom McCarthy – and Hamlet again. The essay's length fulfils a performative function but also facilitates as extensive a catalogue of aspects of the countertextual in literature and elsewhere as is feasible or as might be dared at this stage.

From Deleuze and Guattari's Words to a Deleuzian Theory of Reading

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-557
Author(s):  
Daniel Haines
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Transcendental Empiricism ◽  
Theory Of Reading ◽  
Open Question

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality.

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