4/5/2023 0 Comments Herman hiss*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. It was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. The second book project, Butterfly Tropics: Emily Dickinson, The Archive and The Lyric, investigates Dickinson’s obsession with transmutation and invisible continuities among discrete bodies promised by entomological life forms, to raise the question of how such a preoccupation governs her understanding of the poetic form, as well as what it does for her manner of archiving poetry in fascicles, sets, envelopes, letters or, simply, boxes and chest drawers.(AS TOLD AT THE GOLDEN INN) The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers than in any other part. Ambient Life reads such strange taxonomies against the backdrop of contemporary American science, cosmologies of the Pacific islands, and a series of ethnographic narratives of African religions and customs known to Melville, to chart how their divergent accounts of matter gave rise to his stories of metamorphosis and conjuration, with complex political consequences. In Melville, not only different forms of life, but also elements enter into strange assemblages: moss grows on animals, vegetation turns out to be made of stones, metal glitters on the feet of tortoises, dogs host humans, and lizards hiss with divine anger. The first, Ambient Life, Melville, Materialism and the Ethereal Enlightenment focuses on images of the elemental, vegetal and animal that traverse Melville's work as a means of investigating how he imagined the capacity of matter to move and transform. Her work has appeared in such journals as Common Knowledge, Diacritics, ELH, J19, Leviathan, New England Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Prose, Qui Parle?, Representations, Telos and Textual Practice, and discusses such authors as Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze.Īrsić is currently working on two book projects. She co-edited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and (with Kim Evans) a collection of essays on Melville, entitled Melville’s Philosophies (Bloomsbury, 2017). She has also written On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard UP, 2010), and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (Stanford UP, 2007). It discusses how Thoreau related mourning practices to biological life by articulating a complex theory of decay, and proposing a new understanding of the pathological. She is the author, most recently, of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016), which was awarded the MLA James Russell Lowell prize for the outstanding book of 2016. Professor Arsić specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical and religious contexts.
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