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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century
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The Errant Art of Moby-Dick - The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Paperback, New)
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The Errant Art of Moby-Dick - The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Paperback, New)
Series: New Americanists
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, one of America's most distinguished
critics reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the
occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon
formation. In Moby-Dick--a work virtually ignored and discredited
at the time of its publication--William V. Spanos uncovers a text
remarkably suited as a foundation for a New Americanist critique of
the ideology based on Puritan origins that was codified in the
canon established by Old Americanist critics from F. O. Matthiessen
to Lionel Trilling. But Spanos also shows, with the novel still as
his focus, the limitations of this New Americanist discourse and
its failure to escape the totalizing imperial perspective it finds
in its predecessor.
Combining Heideggerian ontology with a sociopolitical perspective
derived primarily from Foucault, the reading of Moby-Dick that
forms the center of this book demonstrates that the traditional
identification of Melville's novel as a romance renders it
complicitous in the discourse of the Cold War. At the same time,
Spanos shows how New Americanist criticism overlooks the degree to
which Moby-Dick anticipates not only America's self-representation
as the savior of the world against communism, but also the emergent
postmodern and anti-imperial discourse deployed against such an
image. Spanos's critique reveals the extraordinary relevance of
Melville's novel as a post-Cold War text, foreshadowing not only
the self-destructive end of the historical formation of the
American cultural identity in the genocidal assault on Vietnam, but
also the reactionary labeling of the current era as the end of
history.
This provocative and challenging study presents not only a new view
of the development of literary history in the United States, but a
devastating critique of the genealogy of ideology in the American
cultural establishment.
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