Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman

Jonik, Michael

Cambridge University Press（2018/02発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 276 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781108420921
• DDC分類 813.309

Full Description

Studies of the writing of Herman Melville are often divided among those that address his political, historical, or biographical dimensions and those that offer creative theoretical readings of his texts. In Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, Michael Jonik offers a series of nuanced and ambitious philosophical readings of Melville that unite these varied approaches. Through a careful reconstruction of Melville's interaction with philosophy, Jonik argues that Melville develops a notion of the 'inhuman' after Spinoza's radically non-anthropocentric and relational thought. Melville's own political philosophy, in turn, actively disassembles differences between humans and nonhumans, and the animate and inanimate. Jonik has us rethink not only how we read Melville, but also how we understand our deeply inhuman condition.

Contents

Introduction: Melville's inhumanities; 1. 'The constituents of a chaos': character, materiality and ethopolitics in Moby-Dick; 2. A geology of murmurs: Pierre's inhuman transformations; 3. Outlandish beings, outlandish politics: 'The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles'; 4. Misanthropology: commonality and its discontents in The Confidence-Man; 5. 'Where wild rocks are set': character and the space of Clarel; 6. Form, relation, and dissolution in Melville's later poetry; Coda: impulsive Billy Budd.