The Struggle to Appropriate Moby-Dick: Indeterminacy and Positionality

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents ix
3. Acknowledgments xi
4. 1. MOBY-DICK AND THE AMERICAN CANON
5. Posthumanist Theory and Canon Formation 2
6. A Genealogical History of the Reception of Moby-Dick, 1850-1945 12
7. The New Americanist "Field-Imaginary" and the Vietnam War 23
8. The New Americanists and Moby-Dick 31
9. The Limits of the New Americanist Discourse 36
10. 2. METAPHYSICS AND SPATIAL FORM: MELVILLE'S CRITIQUE OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION
11. Tragic Vision and Metaphysics 47
12. Tragic Vision and Moby-Dick 54
13. Melville's Errant Measure: The Testimony of the Fiction Following Moby-Dick 61
14. 3. THE ERRANT ART OF MOBY-DICK
15. The Question of Ishmael's Name 75
16. Ishmael's Reading of Father Mapple's Reading of the Jonah Text 87
17. The Centered Circle, the Imperial Gaze, and Abasement 114
18. The American Adam and the Naming of the White Whale 121
19. Ishmael and the Unnaming of Moby Dick 127
20. Ishmael, Theory, and Practice 131
21. The Self as Orphan 148
22. Ishmael and Negative Capability 156
23. Representation and Errancy: The Art of Narration 166
24. Cetology and Discipline 185
25. Political Economy in Moby-Dick: Toward a Counterhegemony 204
26. Repetition and the Indissoluble Continuum of Being: Melville's Polis 226
27. Moby-Dick as Diabolic Book 232
28. The Question of Ishmael's Name: A Repetition 245
29. The Struggle to Appropriate Moby-Dick: Indeterminacy and Positionality 247
30. 4. MOBY-DICK AND THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN OCCASION
31. The "Vietnam Syndrome" 250
32. Fredric Jameson and Frank Lentricchia: Reading Michael Herr's Dispatches 252
33. The Postmodernity of the Vietnam War 257
34. Moby-Dick and the Vietnam War 266
35. Notes 279
36. Bibliography 353
37. Index 365