| Contents |
Machine generated contents note: Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn -- Meredith Farmer -- Part I. Ontologies -- 1. Sailing without Ahab -- Steve Mentz -- 2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with Whales -- Branka Arsić -- 3. Ahab after Agency -- Mark D. Noble -- 4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New Materialism -- Christian P. Haines -- Part II. Relations -- 5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch Synesthesia -- Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese -- 6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain -- Michael D. Snediker -- 7.'The King is a Thing'; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist Reading -- Russell Sbriglia -- 8. Approaching Ahab Blind -- Christopher Castiglia -- Part III. Politics -- 9. 'this post-mortemizing of the whale': The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old -- Bonnie Honig -- 10.Ahab's Electromagnetic Constitution -- Donald E. Pease -- 11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania -- Jonathan D. S. Schroeder -- 12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of Reason -- Jonathan Lamb -- Part IV. New Melvilles -- 13. Ahab's After-Life: The Tortoises of 'The Encantadas' -- Matthew A. Taylor -- 14. Israel Potter; or, the Excrescence -- Colin Dayan -- 15.Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and Labor -- Ivy Wilson -- 16. Melville's Basement Tapes -- John Modern -- Afterword: Melville Among the Materialists -- Samuel Otter -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Index. |
| Abstract |
"For years critics have viewed Herman Melville's Captain Ahab as the paradigm of a strong, controlling agent. Farmer and Schroeder's volume aims to rethink Ahab through a series of "materialist" frames, including posthumanism, disability studies, affect theory, animal studies, environmental humanities, systems theory, and oceanic studies. The essays here recast Ahab as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment--by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing--in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. Collectively these materialist readings challenge our ways of thinking about the boundaries of both persons and actions, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by 'personhood' and by the 'human"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Genre/form | Criticism, interpretation, etc. |
| LCCN | 2021051565 |
| ISBN | 9781517907549 library binding |
| ISBN | 1517907543 library binding |
| ISBN | 9781517907556 paperback |
| ISBN | 1517907551 paperback |
| ISBN | electronic book |
| ISBN | electronic book |
