Literature, disaster, and the enigma of power : a reading of "Moby-Dick"
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Bibliographic Information
Literature, disaster, and the enigma of power : a reading of "Moby-Dick"
Stanford University Press, 2003
- : cloth
- : pbk
- Other Title
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Literature, disaster, and the enigma of power : a reading of 'Moby-Dick'
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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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