Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Jaros, Peter

Titel

Handsomely Done: Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville ed. by Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, and: Melville among the Philosophers ed. by Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi (review)

Ist Teil von

• Leviathan, 2021-06, Vol.23 (2), p.101-108

Ort / Verlag

Hempstead: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Two recent collections—Melville among the Philosophers, edited by Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi, and Handsomely Done: Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville, edited by Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, both bear witness to an active trade in Melville's work and Melville scholarship and offer revealing pictures of trade relations, international and interdisciplinary, in Melville studies. Ishmael's insistence that "all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea" might risk the status of coffee-mug platitudes, but for its speaker this realization amounts to a "mortally intolerable truth," a forced homelessness that is experienced as pain rather than freedom (NN 107). Just in case things start to feel too sublime, though, the tragedy of the lee shore recurs as the farce of Billy Budd's spilled soup, occasioned by the temporary failure of his sea legs as the Bellipotent, "rolling in her course," gives a "sudden lurch" (NN 25). [...]Tracy B. Strong delineates a thematic cluster around religion, speech, looking, and the face in Typee.