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.
