Comparative religion in Herman Melville's "Clarel".
Item
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Title
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Comparative religion in Herman Melville's "Clarel".
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Identifier
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AAI9830755
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identifier
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9830755
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Creator
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Potter, William Blake.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David S. Reynolds
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Date
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1998
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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 | Religion, Philosophy of | Theology
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Abstract
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Herman Melville's Clarel not only embraces the faith/doubt genre; it is also a study in comparative religion which becomes, in its attempt to locate what it calls "The intersympathy of creeds" (I, v. 1. 207), an investigation into the nature of religious belief itself. Its real niche is thus the burgeoning comparative religious enterprise of the nineteenth century, which includes the works of scholars, theologians, and scientists from many different backgrounds.;My first chapter examines the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comparative religious scene. I explore the work of such figures as Vico, Hume, Herder, Hegel, Max Muller, James Freeman Clarke, and show places in Clarel that reflect Melville's use (knowingly or unknowingly) of some of their theories.;My second chapter discusses Melville's use of dialectical debate in Clarel, and also what I call "the Protestant dilemma," a condition which commences the poem's comparative religious search. The three major characters of the poem, Clarel, Rolfe, and Vine, are American Protestants trapped, as Tocqueville observed, in the tyrannies of the autonomous self and reason. This legacy from the Reformation (and I examine the close historical relationship between science and Protestantism, something remarked upon with some frequency in the poem), leaves the would-be believer particularly vulnerable before the empirical claims of positivism. The poem, in fact, begins on this very note in the first canto.;The next three chapters explore various comparative religious patterns in the poem. Those that I identify include the breakdown of religious orthodoxy and the corresponding ascent of heterodoxy; the suffering shared by all true faith, regardless of its doctrine; the tempered heart theme and its corollary, which is the creed a religion provides its follower with to endure the world, and the respect for traditions even when their metaphysical claims can no longer be embraced since they provide a bastion against the descent into chaos.;In the sixth chapter I explore how some of the world's religions are depicted in the poem.;I include two brief appendices, one exploring the early Christian church's encounter with the pagan world, and the other dealing with aspects of the ineffable.
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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.
