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Why Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear-and our compassion
Herman Melville's Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him 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.
In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville's emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human.
Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville's work.
Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar MartÍnez BenedÍ, U of L'Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John's College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn
Meredith Farmer
Part I. Ontologies
1. Sailing without Ahab
Steve Mentz
2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with Whales
Branka Arsić
3. Ahab after Agency
Mark D. Noble
4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New Materialism
Christian P. Haines
Part II. Relations
5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch Synesthesia
Pilar MartÍnez BenedÍ and Ralph James Savarese
6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain
Michael D. Snediker
7.'The King is a Thing'; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist Reading
Russell Sbriglia
8. Approaching Ahab Blind
Christopher Castiglia
Part III. Politics
9. 'this post-mortemizing of the whale': The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old
Bonnie Honig
10.Ahab's Electromagnetic Constitution
Donald E. Pease
11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder
12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of Reason
Jonathan Lamb
Part IV. New Melvilles
13. Ahab's After-Life: The Tortoises of 'The Encantadas'
Matthew A. Taylor
14. Israel Potter; or, the Excrescence
Colin Dayan
15.Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and Labor
Ivy Wilson
16. Melville's Basement Tapes
John Modern
Afterword: Melville Among the Materialists
Samuel Otter
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
