Melville and the Syntax of Class

Abstract

MLA 2011 | Los Angeles, California Melville and the Syntax of Class Chair: Ivy G. Wilson, Northwestern University In settings as various as whaling ships and Wall Street offices, pastoral meadows and English leisure clubs, Melville’s writings are preoccupied with class formations and with contradictions of decadence and poverty, excess and paucity. While much of the criticism on Melville and class has approached the topic through psychoanalysis to limn readings about his own personal anxieties in works such as Pierre or “Bartleby,” this panel sought to underscore what a historical materialist approach to Melville’s work can reveal about his social world. Glenn Hendler argued that, in “The House-Top,” Melville forced a recognition of the ways in which the white participants of the New York Draft Riots coalesced as a contingent but nonetheless specific class formation. Calling for a more sustained critical engagement with Melville’s transnationalism and tracing his early use of the word “cholo,” Rodrigo Lazo showed how Melville invoked South America and the South American to make class distinctions legible to his readers. Kyla Tompkins analyzed Melville’s preoccupation with taste in “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” as a metaphor for the organization of social differentiation and inequity. Feeling Like a State Glenn Hendler Fordham University Melville’s “The House-Top,” a lyric poem about the 1863 New York City Draft Riots published in Battle-Pieces, remains exceptional not simply as an example of Melville’s genius for compressing the epichistorical into the space of a lyric but also for how it compels the reader to come to terms with the effects and affects of the war’s various permutations. Acknowledging Melville’s engagement with affect, we become aware that the c © 2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 124 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S