Literature, disaster, and the enigma of power : a reading of "Moby-Dick"
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Literature, disaster, and the enigma of power : a reading of "Moby-Dick"
Stanford University Press, 2003
- : cloth
- : pbk
- Other Title
-
Literature, disaster, and the enigma of power : a reading of 'Moby-Dick'
Available at 26 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
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  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [165]-171) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This powerful new reading of Moby-Dick brings into play some of the most consequential theoretical developments of the last three decades in philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism. It takes account of four trends in innovative critical thought: recent theories of power, as articulated by Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, and Agamben; theories of trauma and testimony developed by Felman and Caruth; the new thinking of ethics, articulated by Levinas and Derrida; and the new thinking of history developed by New Historicism. All four, the author argues, participate in a groundbreaking new elaboration of the concept of disaster. Moby-Dick's privilege, the author claims, anticipates this new thinking of the disaster and shows that it demands simultaneously a new thinking of the literary. Read from this perspective, Melville's novel can both be illuminated by these recent theoretical developments and, in turn, illuminate them, adding new and complex dimensions to their findings.
Table of Contents
- Introduction I From Judgment to Power, 3 America-A Witnessing of Europe, 19 1 The Enigma of Power 27 2 Call Me Ishmael 35 Leviathanalysis, 46 3 Ahab's Whale-A Bleeding Wound 48 Language as Hunt
- Language as Wail, 54 4 Ishmael's Whale-Whiteness and the Witness, or the Collapse of the Author 67 The Power of Whiteness, 68 Two Understandings of the Fabulous, 86 Moby-Dick and Literary History, 90 Ishmael: Whale-Author(ity), 98 Coda, 118
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