Melville's Evermoving Dawn contains some of the best writing and thinking on Melville today. Represented here are scholars young and old, traditionalists and new historicists, who gathered at several conferences and venues throughout 1991, the centennial of Herman Melville's death. Meetings occured in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (where Melville wrote Moby-Dick, Pierre, and other works), New York City during Melville week (Sept. 22-28), and Washington, DC, at the Theater of the National Archives. The essays survey the past and present of Melville studies and suggest directions for the future.

IF The Confidence-Man (I857) is a comic masquerade, Frank Goodman is surely its most intriguing masked dancer. He struts and frets on board the Fidele throughout the second half of Melville's novel, shifting rhetoric but never varying his message of confidence. Life is a pic-nic en costume for this metaphysical scamp, and in his multiform personality we find a culmination of the various con men who precede him: he is a philanthropist, genial business man, analogizer, and faith healer (or more aptly, a healer of weary faiths).1 Thus Goodman's epithet-the cosmopolitan-suits him well. His very being confederates all humanity. By any liberal estimation, Goodman should win our admiration because of his cosmopolitanism; and yet, as anyone familiar with Melville's last novel knows, he is, we fear, a con man himself or even a crafty ringleader of con men, a mastermind whose indifferent eyes add to the ominous atmosphere of the dark and smoky ending. Melville's unstable ironies, to borrow Wayne Booth's term, never allow us to pin Goodman down to any certain motive, good or evil.2 Ultimately, he is a literary device borrowed from the culture at large and contrived to immerse the reader more deeply in the problems of faith and doubt.3

In Waiden, Thoreau uncovers a disheartening parallel between edu cation and technology: with our colleges so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. In schools, men and women play life and ignore experiment of living. Thus they may read Adam Smith, but fail to experience the deeper meaning of economy. Modern inventions (pretty toys) present a corresponding di lemma: We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate.1 Schooling and technology are illusions, mere means to indeterminate ends which we have elevated to ends in themselves; they are methods without ideas, processes without sub stance. As teaching itself becomes more technologized, Thoreau's in sights into the American preoccupation with process take on added significance, especially with respect to composition. The prevailing view among today's teachers of English is that writing is a process, not a product. It is a method that transcends all disciplines. And, we assume, it can be taught independently of particular subject matters. When I began teaching composition, I felt that my emphasis on process would assuage my students' fears of writing. With positivis tic zeal, I informed them that writing involves a finite, comprehen sible, and acquirable set of skills applicable to any course of study. It is little more than a bag of tricks, and one need not be poetic nor privy to special knowledge to grab the bag. Common sense and personal experience are the only prerequisites. Moreover, in empha sizing method, I (like many others) saw wisdom in removing my own discipline, literature, from the classroom. As for subjects to write about, I directed students to turn not to novels but to them selves. Ann E. Berthoff provides a cogent justification for this ap proach. As meaning-makers, we give shape to the chaotic environ ment around us. In order for meanings to occur, we must loosen our

Research Article| December 01 1984 "Nowhere a Stranger": Melville and Cosmopolitanism John Bryant John Bryant Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1984) 39 (3): 275–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/3044805 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John Bryant; "Nowhere a Stranger": Melville and Cosmopolitanism. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 December 1984; 39 (3): 275–291. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3044805 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1984 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.