| Description |
1 online resource (458 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn -- Part I: Ontologies -- Chapter 1: Sailing without Ahab -- Chapter 2: Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with Whales -- Chapter 3: Ahab after Agency -- Chapter 4: Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow -- or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New Materialism -- Part II: Relations -- Chapter 5: Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch Synesthesia -- Chapter 6: Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain -- Chapter 7: "The King Is a Thing." |
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Or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist Reading -- Chapter 8: Approaching Ahab Blind -- Part III: Politics -- Chapter 9: "This Post-Mortemizing of the Whale": The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old -- Chapter 10: Ahab's Electromagnetic Constitution -- Chapter 11: The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania -- Chapter 12: Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of Reason -- Part IV: New Melvilles -- Chapter 13: Ahab's After-Life: The Tortoises of "The Encantadas" -- Chapter 14: Israel Potter -- or, The Excrescence |
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Chapter 15: Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and Labor -- Chapter 16: Melville's Basement Tapes -- Afterword: Melville among the Materialists -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Index |
| Summary |
"For years critics have viewed Herman Melville's Captain Ahab as the paradigm of a strong, controlling agent. Farmer and Schroeder's volume aims to rethink Ahab through a series of "materialist" frames, including posthumanism, disability studies, affect theory, animal studies, environmental humanities, systems theory, and oceanic studies. The essays here recast Ahab as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment--by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing--in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. Collectively these materialist readings challenge our ways of thinking about the boundaries of both persons and actions, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by 'personhood' and by the 'human"-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 27, 2022) |
| Subject |
Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Moby Dick.
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Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 -- Characters
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Ahab, Captain (Fictitious character)
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| SUBJECT |
Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 -- Characters -- Captain Ahab
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Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Moby Dick
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Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 fast |
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Ahab, Captain (Fictitious character) fast |
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Moby Dick (Melville, Herman) fast |
| Subject |
Sea stories, American -- History and criticism
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Materialism in literature.
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Whaling in literature.
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Sailors in literature.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General.
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Characters and characteristics
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Materialism in literature
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Sailors in literature
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Sea stories, American
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Whaling in literature
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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Literary criticism
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Literary criticism.
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Critiques littéraires.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| Author |
Farmer, Meredith, 1983- editor.
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Schroeder, Jonathan (D. S.), 1981- editor.
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Otter, Samuel, 1956- writer of foreword.
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| ISBN |
9781452961095 |
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1452961093 |
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1452961085 |
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9781452961088 |
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