All Astir

Abstract

All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards I write this column still basking in the glow of the Eleventh International Melville Conference, “Melville’s Crossings,” which was held at King’s College London on June 27–30. Thank you to Janet Floyd, Wyn Kelley, and above all Ed Sugden for organizing a successful and joyous conference. The conference drew 160 participants from five continents and included three keynote addresses, roundtable discussions, concurrent sessions, tours, receptions, lunches, and a well-attended public event at the British Library, “Looking for Melville.” The British Library occasion, as the flyer noted, was “an afternoon exploring recent responses to the complex and controversial American author,” including artists, authors, filmographers, and biographers. The crowning event was the conference dinner held at long wooden tables in the dining hall of Balliol College, Oxford University, preceded by a champagne reception on the front steps of the building. Reports on the conference and a photo gallery will appear in the next issue of Leviathan. Please join us for the Melville Society session that will be held at the 2018 MLA Convention in New York, January 4–7, 2018. Munia Bhaumik (Emory Univ.) is the organizer and chair of a session entitled “Political Philosophy in Melville.” Michael Jonik, (Univ. of Sussex) will speak on “‘Diogenes in Disguise’: Cynicism and Politics in The Confidence-Man,” Ana Schwartz (Univ. of Pennsylvania,) on “Killers, Whales,” Paulo M. Loonin (Washington Univ. in St. Louis) on “Melville and Democratic Portraiture: Moby-Dick as American Laocoon,” and Nathan Wolf (Tufts Univ.) on “‘Dead then I’ll be’: Melville, Hobbes, and the Death of Politics.” Jennifer Greiman (Wake Forest Univ.) will serve as the respondent. Congratulations to Paul Hurh, the 2016 Hennig Cohen Prize winner. The prize committee wrote of Hurh’s work: “This year’s Hennig Cohen Prize for the best article, book chapter, or essay on Herman Melville goes to Paul Hurh for ‘Dread: Space, Time, and Automata in The Piazza Tales,’ a chapter in his book American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford University Press, 2015). Hurh offers a powerful argument for reading The Piazza Tales as a work in its own right, while showing the importance of terror to Melville’s conceptions of affective and intellectual experience. Carefully attending to the ‘motley nature’ of The Piazza Tales, Hurh proposes a ‘unified [End Page 137] reading’ that reveals a book intensely concerned with moods, ‘deep undercurrents of melancholy, anxiety, and unease,’ that he describes as forms of terror. Hurh links Melville’s terror to a concept of dread (Angest) developed by Kierkegaard to account for human freedom, and transformed in Heidegger’s examination of the spatial and temporal nature of existence. Like the philosophers, Melville provides ‘affective descriptions of philosophical dilemmas.’ More particularly, Hurh shows, Melville’s practices of ‘spatial deformation and temporal miscalibration’ produce a startling ‘understanding of time and space as a function of terror.’ Hurh’s chapter illuminates subtle connections among the tales of The Piazza Tales, while offering extended, revelatory readings of the relatively neglected ‘The Lightning-Rod Man’ and ‘The Bell-Tower.’ Hurh reads Melville’s book with an extraordinary balance of philosophical sophistication, historical acuity, and unabashed devotion to the ‘strange particulars’ of Melville’s writing. This chapter promises to change the way The Piazza Tales is read, while challenging readers to reconsider Melville’s thinking about materiality, subjectivity, interpersonal relations, and philosophy.” Click for larger view View full resolution Leviathan appears as a question on “Jeopardy.” Melville scholars reveled in the fact that last April the Melville Society journal appeared on “Jeopardy.” The category was “American Authors,” the answer was “Leviathan is a journal put out 3 times a year by an organization dedicated to this author & his works,” and the question was, “Who is . . . ?” On [End Page 138] Monday morning, April 10, it was the sample “Jeopardy” question of the day in the New York Times “Arts” section. When the show appeared on television that evening, one contestant answered correctly, one guessed Mark Twain, and one guessed Thomas Hobbes. As Samuel Otter, Editor of Leviathan, noted at the time: “‘Hobbes,’ of course, is not correct, but it’s not a bad guess...