This essay, a substantial revision of the plenary I delivered at the Melville Society Conference in June of 2025, argues that Melville's use of haunting allows for a more elastic analysis of his treatment of revolution, one that encompasses both its possibilities and its failures. Using Derrida's concept of hauntology as my launching point I argue that Melville's use of various specters constitutes an indictment of the failure of revolution to perform its office, but this does not necessarily indicate an anti-revolutionary stance as C.L.R. James writes in Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Rather, these hauntings act as insistent reminders of the stakes of continuing to demand more from the rhetoric of revolution. In my analysis of Pip's madness, I analyze Pip's retreat into the figure of Jim Crow as a grotesque form of resistance.
This essay tracks a recent book of poetry, Sailing without Ahab, which traces the voyage of the Pequod without its Captain and with a series of twenty-first century companions. The poems both articulate a reading of Moby-Dick and also describe a watery way of living shadowed by Melville's novel. Fellow readers and artists including Courtney Leonard, Philip Hoare, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and the mapmaker John Wyatt Greenlee join in the voyage. In one hundred thirty-eight poems-one for each chapter, plus the Extracts, Etymology, and Epilogue-this book swims and dances with Melville's novel into an uncertain and variable present day.
This article provides a new update on books owned by Herman Melville that have been re-described at Melville's Marginalia Online since the publication of Steven Olsen-Smith and Peter Norberg's "Second Update on Books Owned, Borrowed, and Consulted by Herman Melville" in the June 2021 issue of Leviathan (23.2). This includes a major new announcement of recently recovered marginalia in Melville's 10-volume set of James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson as well as revisions of attribution to his Riches of Chaucer. These readings underscore the importance of Melville's reading of critics, biographers, and historians to enhance his knowledge of major literary figures.
This essay is the fourth and final chapter in the author's research on the origins of the Melville revival. The previous studies appeared in Leviathan 15.1 (March 2013), 19.1 (March 2017), and 23.1 (2021), with each essay asking the question, who were the persons most responsible for launching what was arguably the greatest revival in American literary history? This essay details the contributions of a figure long overlooked by literary historians, the poet and scholar Charles Wilbert Snow, a Columbia University classmate of Carl Van Doren and later a professor of Charles Olson. It was Snow who first encouraged Van Doren to read Melville's work, before Van Doren himself encouraged Raymond Weaver.
This essay analyzes Moby-Dick to unpack several distinctions between the black/white binary associated with plantation slavery-with its adherence to physiognomic racism and religious discourse-and the modes of categorization available on the whaling ship. While the underlying logics of racialization are opened to ideological critique on the Pequod, they remain bound to the stereotypical vocabularies of geographic and ethnographic speculation. At the same time the logics of race and capital required that national identity be severed from Black and Indigenous categorical makeup, the ongoing expansion of the colonial project necessitated the continued existence of geographically coded raciality. While the stereotypical vocabulary remains firmly embedded in Melville's representational language, the prevalence of merchant capital works in tandem with his radical abolitionism, giving rise to a mode of racialization that is not tethered to the moral discourses which underwrite typical abolitionist literature. In Moby-Dick's encyclopedic geographies, this essay argues, it becomes possible to constellate the overlapping knowledge-power relations that would become constitutive of contemporary racialization-and to understand that constellation as fundamental to both literary modernism and capitalist modernity.
All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards Click for larger view View full resolution Sanford E. (Sandy) Marovitz (1933–2023) with his wife Nora at his side. Photo courtesy of Dennis Berthold. This "All Astir" begins with the sad news of the passing of Sanford (Sandy) Marovitz on July 9, 2023, at the age of 90. Sandy chaired the creation of the Melville Society's 1990 by-laws, which, as John Bryant points out, initiated "an era of growth and inclusivity for the Society." He organized the first international Melville conference, in Volos, Greece, and his inspiration and hard work were instrumental in creating the biannual Melville conferences that have ever since been such an astounding success. Dennis Berthold writes of his passing: "Sandy Marovitz was one of the most significant and productive members of the Melville Society over many years. His scholarship was widely published, and his colleagues admired [End Page 105] not only his publications but also his wise support for our many Melville conferences. He was, at least to me, a mensch, and he loved it when I used the word and led it to fascinating conversations among our members. His repartee was rich with discussion that inspired others and plunged along with him into numerous controversies that celebrated vibrant topics that kept our society alive. He could be funny, wise, helpful, and a bit demanding at times, something required as any good scholar would acknowledge. It's hard to believe that he is gone, yet his guidance to others will continue for years to come through his many publications and his genuine generosity toward others." Giorgio Mariani adds: "I am deeply sorry to hear of Sandy's passing. I had the pleasure of meeting him a few times, and I corresponded with him several years ago, when he sent me his Melville as Poet, which I had the honor of reviewing for RSV—Rivista di Studi Vittoriani (Journal of Victorian Studies). Sandy was also a very good friend of my University of Rome colleague Igina Tattoni, with whom I shared an office for many years, and who was a Thomas Wolfe scholar who received her Ph.D. from Kent State. She had immense respect for him. I remember him as a distinguished, bright, and very amicable person. As we would say in Italy, Sandy 'era un signore,' and when you say that, you've said it all." John Bryant responds: "Grazie, Giorgio. As you say, Sandy 'era un signore.' Which is to say, as others have: 'Anche, era un mensch.' For my Greenwood Companion to Melville, Sandy wrote a concise, thorough, useful, and artful chapter on the world reception of Melville, titled 'Herman Melville: A Writer for the World.' Sandy, too, was 'for the world.'" Continuing the theme of the Volos conference, Robert K. Wallace writes: "Sandy was such a joy and inspiration to so many of us for so many decades. He was in many ways the heart and the engine for the collegial Society that now mourns his loss and celebrates his life. All of us who attended that first international conference in Volos that he co-hosted with Athanasios Christodoulou feel eternally grateful to him for that and so much else." Gordon M. Poole also mentions Volos as well as Sandy's strength as an editor and scholar: "This is sad news. Sanford was not only a likable, friendly person, but also a scholar and a gentleman. Volos, wonderfully organized by Sandy and Athanasios Christodoulou in 1999, was my first Melville Conference and made me a convinced Melvillean. The proceedings, published in 2001, is one of the most beautifully crafted books in my library. Sandy published my essay as I submitted it, without any need for corrections. So maybe I was expecting easy sailing when I submitted my proposal for Melville as Poet (2013). Talk about 'demanding'! Sandy as editor raked me over the coals. My contribution to that fine collection is perhaps not cohesive enough, but it is much better than it would have been [End Page 106] Click for larger view View full resolution Athanasios Christodoulou and Sanford E. Marovitz at Northern Kentucky University, May 2000. Photo courtesy of Robert K. Wallace...
Abstract: This essay explores the force of childlessness in Melville’s writing and its queer afterlives. It focuses in particular on Ahab’s coining of the term “joy-childlessness” in Moby-Dick , situating it within the demographics of population decline in the late nineteenth century and within the paradoxical psychic (and textual) unfolding of griefs and joys as Ahab understands them. The essay then draws on “joy-childlessness” in a reading of Kit De Waal’s subtle rewriting of Moby-Dick into a recent young adult novel, Becoming Dinah . I see in Becoming Dinah , a fertile legacy of for Melville’s “joy-childlessness” as it unfolds in queer, affective complexity throughout the novel. To understand the dynamics of textual and demographic afterlives in de Waal’s novel, I rely on Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic concept of the “enigmatic signifier.” Laplanche’s psychoanalytic approach facilitates my reading of the formal effects of de Waal’s engagement with Melville’s work and provides a useful methodology for understanding the queer and psychic textual afterlives of childlessness.
The idiom of coming out became paradigmatic for homosexual expression and social recognition in the era of gay liberation, and in its early years, academic queer theory developed very much alongside this idiom. The present essay aims to historicize "outing" in queer Melville scholarship, the better to understand how and why that idiom appeared as it did. This historicization relates the story of Melville par lui-m & ecirc;me, a 1958 half-biographical, half-critical volume published in France by a not-particularly-queer French professor, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, and rapidly translated into English by a gay American poet, John Ashbery. The translation is characterized by a stylistic commitment to diminishing or downplaying the frankly homoerotic episodes in Melville's texts. This essay argues that Ashbery's attempts to subdue Mayoux's accounts of Melville's queerness in translation are, paradoxically, the translator's covert means of recognizing and expressing Melville's homoerotic episodes to those in the know. The English translation of Melville par lui-m & ecirc;me illuminates an idiom of expressive indirection, of, as it were, not coming out, which appears as its own coded form of homosexual expression and social recognition in the 1950s and sets the stage for queer readings of Melville in the 1990s.
