Literary Form in the Works of Herman Melville (1819-1891)

FAIN: FEL-257517-18

Samuel Otter
University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)

Completion of a book-length study on literary form in the works of American author Herman Melville.

I analyze what “form” meant to Herman Melville, in concept and in literary practice, with the hope that such an inquiry not only will illuminate his complex career, which in its variety, scope, and duration continues to elude most readers and critics, but also will advance our understanding of this key term in literary studies. Across the chapters, I examine verbal form in terms of the relationships that give it definition: between parts and wholes, structure and duration, inside and outside, word and image, and prose and poetry. Focusing on Melville, whose work has served an exemplary function in the development of American literary criticism, and revising our understanding of the forms and form of his literary career, I provide an alternative to the persistent, resurgent, and misguided choice between “form” and “history,” “text” and “context.” Rather than an alternative to such relations, literary form is located at their tense, vibrant intersection.

Associated Products

"Melville's Style" (Article)
Title: "Melville's Style"
Author: Samuel Otter
Abstract: I argue for the significance across Melville’s writing of the colonial encounters in the South Pacific that he experienced and then fictionalized in his first book, Typee (1846). Linking Melville’s early prose in Typee to his later poetry, especially the Holy Land epic Clarel (1876) and the short poem “To Ned” (1888), I analyze a characteristic verbal line that Melville associated with the fissured landscape of the island of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, where he spent a month in 1842 after jumping ship: a line of sight composed of ridges and gaps, whose traversal involves a discontinuous progression. The distances and depths that open unexpectedly between adjective and noun or between adjective and verb or across the syntax in Melville’s prose and poetry are continually tied to experiences of disorientation and reorientation. By analyzing a verbal strenuousness and sensuousness in Melville’s lines that gain force from ideological situation, I seek to contribute to recent efforts to come to terms with the elusive concept of verbal style. Crossing the boundaries of prose and poetry, I respond to Colin Dayan’s recent provocation in her essay “Melville’s Creatures” (2014): “Let us imagine what prose would look like if it were to become a perspectival phenomenon, a means of seeing otherwise or crosswise.”
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/new-melville-studies/88915E2EED39384C7B27E5913B1E2EC0
Primary URL Description: Cambridge University Press website
Access Model: purchase only
Format: Other
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

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