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2014 | 38 | 1 |

Article title

The Will and the Whale: Glory and the Horizon of Defiance in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Content

Title variants

Languages of publication

EN

Abstracts

EN
This article proposes a reading of Man’s challenge to nature’s grandeur. It is furthermore designed to delineate the insatiable desire of the American man to attain glory at all costs. As the title suggests, I shall try to highlight the horizon of defiance to nature’s rules through the American classic Moby Dick (1851). In sum, I shall be discussing the American man’s penchant for defying failure throughout Ahab, the vengeful character who is in the tradition of the evil man of fiction who strives to annihilate “evil” with evil. By so doing, I will shed light on how Ahab’s will cannot surpass Nature’s will and how this engages Ahab in a Schopenhaueran pessimistic disappointment.

Keywords

EN

Year

Volume

38

Issue

1

Physical description

Dates

published
2014
online
2015-05-20

Contributors

References

  • Blumenthal, Rachel. (2006). Herman Melville’s Politics of Imperialism: Colonizing
  • and De-colonizing Spaces of Ethnicity, Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research
  • Journal. Vol. 2: (pp 1-9).
  • Cope, David. (1999). Melville/ Shakespeare, available from https://cms.grcc.edu/sites/default/files/docs/shakespeare/contemporary/melville_s hakespeare.pdf (1-15).
  • Matthiessen, F.O. (1968). American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of
  • Emerson and Whitman. New York. Oxford University Press.
  • Melville, Herman. (1994). Moby Dick, Prentice Hall. Penguin Popular Classics (first
  • published in 1851).
  • Moseley, Gabriel. (2009). Ahab’s Splintered Self. ECLS Student Scholarship.
  • Occidental College: (pp 1-27).
  • Muir, Kenneth. (1979). Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence, New York, Barnes & Noble.
  • Mumford, Lewis et al. (1970). The Human Prospect, Carbondale and Edwardsville.
  • Southern Illinois University Press.
  • Pritchard, Greg. (2003). Moby Dick and the Philosopher of Pessimism, Australian
  • Journal of American Studies. Vol 22 N°1 electronic version: (34-48).
  • Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1923). Studies in Pessimism, Trans. T. B. Saunders. London.
  • George Allen and Unwin.
  • Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1969). The World as Will and Representation, Trans. E. F. J.
  • Payne, 2 vols. New York. Dover Publications.
  • Tanner, Tony. (2000). The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to
  • Delillo, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Document Type

Publication order reference

Identifiers

YADDA identifier

bwmeta1.element.ojs-doi-10_17951_lsmll_2014_38_1_77
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