Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Speechless, Placeless Power”: Affect And Trauma In Moby-Dick And “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, Lauren Colandro

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” contain affectively unsound figures such as Captain Ahab and Bartleby that seem to disrupt larger narrative functions, both developing these characteristics in response to prior trauma. However, narrators are not privy to the extent of their feelings because of their idealistic attachments to the disruptive figures. This thesis examines the commonalities of Melville’s disruptive characters in both stories using affect theory, as well as how their disruptions illuminate the effects of repressed trauma in an increasingly capital-driven society.

How Queer Came To Be: Deconstructing White Queerness In Melville's "Bartleby," Ginsberg's Howl, And Morrison's A Mercy, Sara Elizabeth Parnell Wilcox

Graduate Theses

In American LGBTQ+ communities, questions continually arise about what it means to live in a post-gay marriage world. Is there still a need for a division between LGBTQ+ and heteronormative spaces, such as nightclubs or parades? What purpose does the ideological signification of a queer identity serve if, ostensibly, queer communities are now equal with their heteronormative counterparts? Rather than accepting the homonormative, post-gay marriage premise that underlies frequent, current representations of “queerness” in terms of white, male, gay bodies, I plan to explore the convergence of aesthetics and politics as a method of freeing queer theory from some of …

Melville's Mardi And The Book Of Mormon, Giordano Lahaderne

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

While Melville’s Mardi has long remained a puzzle to both readers and critics, scholars agree that his third novel marked a significant turning point in his writing career. It is with Mardi that Meville realized the novel as a form suited to grapple the various philosophical and religious questions he would famously explore in his following book, Moby Dick. Although scholars have already pinpointed many various sources for Mardi, this thesis examines the heretofore overlooked connections between Melville’s third book and the esoteric volume of American scripture, the Book of Mormon.

The first chapter of this thesis examines …

"Dollars Damn Me": Editorial Politics And Herman Melville's Periodical Fiction, Timothy R. Morris

Theses and Dissertations

To illustrate Melville’s navigation of editorial politics in the periodical marketplace, this study analyzes two stories Melville published in Putnam’s in order to reconstruct the particular historical, editorial, social, and political contexts of these writings. The first text examined in this study is “Bartleby,” published in Putnam’s in November and December of 1853. This reading recovers overtures of sociability and indexes formal appropriations of established popular genres in order to develop an interpretive framework. Throughout this analysis, an examination of the narrator’s ideological bearings in relation to the unsystematic implementation of these ideologies in American public life sets forth a …

On The Matter Of God’S Goodness: An Examination Of The Failure Of Theodicies, Herman Melville, And An Alternative Approach To The Problem Of Evil, Marie Angeles

Scripps Senior Theses

Within Judeo-Christianity there is a belief in an all perfect God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. However, in this world evil and suffering exists, so how is it possible that an all perfect God can exist? This is called the problem of evil. This thesis examines the problem of evil and how philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, John Hick, and Richard Swinburne attempt to solve the problem of evil through different theodicies. In this paper I argue that all three philosophers and their theodicies fail to solve the problem of evil. I then turn to the writings of Herman Melville, …

Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch

Dissertations

Despite a high number of ticket sales, theater reviews, and innumerable letters and diary entries detailing trips to the theater, the stereotype that theater in nineteenth-century America was almost culturally invisible continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century drama, even though figures like Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights. Just as it did in American life, theater exhibits a strong presence in the literature of the time. Considering theater’s pervasiveness, this dissertation seeks to restore it to its proper place in our study of …

Literary Tendencies In The Short Story, Harper's Magazine, 1850-1870, Marguerite Leahy

English Language and Literature ETDs

The short story is a peculiarly American contribution to the field of literature. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, while at the beginning presenting stories mainly from English authors, did not refuse them from other sources, and French as well as German writers were included among the contributors.

During the first decade covered by this study, the author [of a short story] was rarely mentioned, and a great deal of research was involved to ascertain this information. After 1860 due credit was given the author in every instance. Despite their many imperfections, these early stories did form a bridge from the …