Literature, disaster and the enigma of power
Subtitle: a reading of 'Moby-Dick'
By: Eyal Peretz.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 176
Subjects: Melville, Herman, 1819-1891; Melville, Herman, 1819-1891 -- Political and social views; Sea stories, American -- History and criticism; Power (Social sciences) in literature; Whaling in literature; Whales in literature
Description: "The history of the twentieth century has been marked by incredible violence and catastrophe. These events not only affected the material and historical conditions of life, but had profound conceptual implications. Over the last fifty years, all the traditional artistic and theoretical fields, from philosophy to law, history, and literary theory, have been transformed.

Indeed, one might speak of a catastrophic turn in the realm of thinking and in the concepts and the problems that various theoretical discourses must face.".

"From within this existential and conceptual revolution, the present book examines what is arguably the most profound and complex narrative of disaster in modern literature - Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Melville's novel, the book claims, identified and explored ahead of its time - in a gesture that Walter Benjamin famously called the literary work's "secret appointment with a future moment"- perhaps in an unparalleled manner, the crucial implications of a new thinking of disaster, a thinking that necessarily has to do with a new thinking of the literary."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [165]-171) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction I; title: From Judgment to Power, 3; title: America-A Witnessing of Europe, 19; title: 1 The Enigma of Power 27; title: 2 Call Me Ishmael 35; title: Leviathanalysis, 46; title: 3 Ahab's Whale-A Bleeding Wound 48; title: Language as Hunt; Language as Wail, 54; title: 4 Ishmael's Whale-Whiteness and the Witness, or the Collapse of the Author 67; title: The Power of Whiteness, 68; title: Two Understandings of the Fabulous, 86; title: Moby-Dick and Literary History, 90; title: Ishmael: Whale-Author(ity), 98; title: Coda, 118.