(Minor Field) Herman Melville

SOME QUESTIONS AND ISSUES: — Melville the Menippean? How can knowledge of the Menippean tradition help us understand the relationship between Melville's aesthetics of the sublime and the unrepresentable, on the one hand, and his philosophical and epistemological parodies, on the other? — How did Melville come into contact with the Menippean tradition? — Why did Melville experiment with such a wide range of genres and styles? What motivated his generic choices? How did they shape his fiction? — What was the role of the 19th century American literary marketplace and cultural context, compared to that of the Menippean tradition? How are they related?

TEXTS Typee (1846) Omoo (1847) Mardi (1849) Redburn (1849) White-Jacket (1850) Moby-Dick. or The Whale (1851) Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852) Israel Potter (1855) The Piazza Tales (1856) The Confidence Man (1857) Battle-Pieces (1866) Clarel (1876) Billy Budd (1891) Correspondence Journals SECONDARY READINGS Peter Bellis — No Mysteries Out of Ourselves: Identity and Textual Form in the Novels of Herman Melville John Bryant — Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance Nancy Fredricks — Melville's Art of Democracy Sheila Post-Lauria — Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the MArketplace David S. Reynolds — Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville — Laurie Robertson-Lorant — Melville: A 'Biography Elizabeth Schultz — Unpainted to the last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth Century American Art Christopher Sten — The Weaver God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel John Wenke — Melville's Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction