The Value of Herman Melville

Description

In The Value of Herman Melville, Geoffrey Sanborn presents Melville to us neither as a somber purveyor of dark truths nor as an ironist who has outthought us in advance but as a quasi-maternal provider, a writer who wants more than anything else to supply us with the means of enriching our experiences. In twelve brief chapters, Sanborn examines the distinctive qualities of Melville's style - its dynamism, its improvisatoriness, its intimacy with remembered or imagined events - and shows how those qualities, once they have become a part of our equipment for living, enable us to sink deeper roots into the world. Ranging across his career, but focusing in particular on Moby-Dick, 'Bartleby, the Scrivener', 'Benito Cereno', and Billy Budd, Sanborn shows us a Melville who is animating rather than overawing, who encourages us to bring more of ourselves to the present and to care more about the life that we share with others.

Geoffrey Sanborn is currently the Henry S. Poler '59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He is the author of Plagiarama!: William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions (2016), Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and the Maori (2011), and The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (1998). He has also co-edited Melville and Aesthetics (2011) with Samuel Otter and published cultural-historical editions of William Wells Brown's Clotel (2016) and Herman Melville's Typee (2003). His essays on writers such as Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Edgar Allan Poe, Sandra Cisneros, and James Fenimore Cooper, have appeared in American Literature, PMLA, J19, African American Review, ELH, and elsewhere. His essay 'Whence Come You, Queequeg?' won the Foerster Prize for Best Essay in American Literature in 2006 and his essay 'Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment' won the Parker Prize for Best Essay in PMLA in 2002.

'Everyone who loves literature, not to mention Melville, should read this book.' R. T. Prus, Choice '... Sanborn turns his attention to the reader's encounter with Melville, and the results are an absolutely stunning and beautiful work of critical attention, and more importantly, of use.' Matthew Crow, The Nautilus 'With one hundred years and counting of scholarly and popular tomes on Melville now available, what new - and what more - is there to say about Melville and Moby-Dick? Enter Geoffrey Sanborn, Professor of English at Amherst College, and his slim, eminently insightful new volume The Value of Herman Melville. Dr. Sanborn reads Moby-Dick through the lenses of philosophy, literary criticism, and psychoanalytic theory, and brings Melville and Moby-Dick alive in ways that few have done before. With the generosity of a patient teacher and the enthusiasm of a wise and knowledgeable tour guide eager to show travelers the hidden wonders of a quaint old city he knows so well ...' Daniel Ross Goodman, National Review '... bracing and elegant ... With Melville's own animated reading practice as his guide, Sanborn proffers a theory of criticism as a vital and restorative enterprise, one that takes seriously its responsibility to 'give books a future that will allow their value to evolve.' Jennifer Greiman, American Literary Scholarship 'Sanborn's book ... is an impassioned, sometimes hilarious work and a deeply pedagogical one. He is modeling for us a way of using Melville, of activating the process of thinking about his generative objects. The value comes, finally, in cultivating further connections for ourselves and also in the readiness for new perceptions when confronted with anything as puzzling or difficult as Melville's own texts.' Elisa Tamarkin, Leviathan