Philosophy and society: Melville's modernity.
Item
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Title
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Philosophy and society: Melville's modernity.
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Identifier
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AAI9605634
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identifier
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9605634
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Creator
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Mendelsohn, Eric Noah.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David Reynolds
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Sociology, General | Philosophy
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Abstract
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The dissertation places key works by Herman Melville in the "mass society" tradition of social criticism, whose influence on American literature has been overlooked. Among the eclectic mass society themes, I focus on the idea that modern, competitive societies, because they lack inherent unity, foster "fictional" forms of unity including mass culture, whose strong political role Melville depicts. In Typee, the social principles of the tribal Typees, which correspond both to the older community or Gemeinschaft and to the dreams of utopian socialism, appear to the narrator to be an authentic alternative to what sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies called the "imaginary and mechanical" Gesellschaft, or society. The novel's ambiguous ending, however, suggests that by idealizing the tribal community the narrator fails to escape the "imaginary" Gesellschaft and actually participates in a mass culture obsessed with symbolic "savages.".;In Moby-Dick, Melville pursues themes related to mass society, including the repudiation of Hume's skepticism--because it yields the "whiteness of the whale"--the ambiguities of Emerson's idealism, and the regressive psychology of the masses. Anticipating Gustave Le Bon's theory of the crowd, Ahab invokes the "law of mental unity"; he diverts the idealist symbol to politics; now the symbol--the whale--attracts the "savage" energies still circulating in the unconscious of the "detribalized" crew and welds them into unity. Moreover, Melville links Ahab to mass cultural forms--revivalism, alcoholism, Jacksonian democracy, and mesmerism--to indicate, as Le Bon will, that mass culture and politics merge in modernity.;Ahab's crowd psychology portends the larger polity of the mass public, which extends the "laws" of the crowd to all of society. In "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids," Melville puts the thinking of the public, its "common sense," into crisis on many levels including the thermodynamic. Common sense assumes the objective necessity of its world and represses its arbitrary underpinnings; in contrast, Bartleby's inability to work anticipates Henry Adams' "dynamic theory of history." Like Adams, Melville renders the nothingness of mass society in terms of its ultimate entropy.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
