Identity through Ekphrasis: The Gold Doubloon
- ️https://crimson.academia.edu/JoshuaAaronTinker
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Paradox and Philosophical Anticipation in Melville's Moby-Dick
Much of the current critical literature on Moby-Dick lacks a unifying focus. This essay attempts to provide a thread of continuity for Moby-Dick by proving that paradox and Herman Melville's anticipation of the early existential movement hold the key to a full reading of this text. By viewing the text itself, Melville's personal correspondence, and the writings of Emerson, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, the paradoxical tension by which this text must be read comes into clearer focus.
The Carnival of Herman Melville's Moby Dick
This study aims to scrutinize the extent to which Bakhtin's theory of Carnivalesque is pertinent to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Published in 1851, the novel was taken by many critics as another simple adventure narrative in the same manner as Typee or Redburn, a romance of adventure illustrated by the author's two-year experience as a harpooner. But it turned out to be something quite new when it was reviewed. Melville bravely and cleverly touches upon the taboos of mid-nineteenth century American life, and the utopian freedom, community, and equality in the social domain of Bakhtin's carnival can be found in this novel. The overturning of popular culture, the mingling of the sacred with the profane and the sublime with the ridiculous, allow the voices to dethrone the authority of official culture. Certain actions and events in Moby Dick are nothing short of the renowned theory by the celebrated Russian linguist.
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This essay originated as a public lecture and is structured as a lecture, with a Q & A section at the end. Its form mimics both the shape of a sperm whale and Moby-Dick’s metafictional qualities. The lecture focused on the epistemological and ontological complexity of human quest for knowledge and the ways in which this complexity is reflected in the structural duality of the novel and the narrative’s vacillating point of view. The Q & A section addresses the biblical influences in Moby-Dick, predestination and foreshadowing, gender, and metafiction’s receptional and generic constraints.
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Readers of C.L.R. James are familiar with the thinker's careful reading of Melville's Moby-Dick in his text Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. In that work James proposes that Melville exposes the foundations of societal level fascism as exemplified by the monomaniacal purpose of Ahab. The purpose of this effort is to push further into the concept of societal division as exemplified by Moby-Dick by proposing that Melville is taking on the discourse of color (black vs. white) and its relationship to ontological value (bad vs. good) by imploding the internal logic of Plato's Phaedrus. What concerns this project is the relationship between the phe-notypic " blackness " of the characters of African descent in Moby-Dick and ways in which Melville endeavors to destabilize skin color in the western imaginary as a means to correct the negative consequences of this flattening of the hierarchical nature of society on the part of Ahab.