Errant Art of Moby-Dick / New Americanists (PDF)

In The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, one of America's most distinguished critics reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. In Moby-Dick-a work virtually ignored and discredited at the time of its publication-William V. Spanos uncovers a text remarkably suited as a foundation for a "e;New Americanist"e; critique of the ideology based on Puritan origins that was codified in the canon established by "e;Old Americanist"e; critics from F. O. Matthiessen to Lionel Trilling. But Spanos also shows, with the novel still as his focus, the limitations of this "e;New Americanist"e; discourse and its failure to escape the totalizing imperial perspective it finds in its predecessor.Combining Heideggerian ontology with a sociopolitical perspective derived primarily from Foucault, the reading of Moby-Dick that forms the center of this book demonstrates that the traditional identification of Melville's novel as a "e;romance"e; renders it complicitous in the discourse of the Cold War. At the same time, Spanos shows how New Americanist criticism overlooks the degree to which Moby-Dick anticipates not only America's self-representation as the savior of the world against communism, but also the emergent postmodern and anti-imperial discourse deployed against such an image. Spanos's critique reveals the extraordinary relevance of Melville's novel as a post-Cold War text, foreshadowing not only the self-destructive end of the historical formation of the American cultural identity in the genocidal assault on Vietnam, but also the reactionary labeling of the current era as "e;the end of history."e;This provocative and challenging study presents not only a new view of the development of literary history in the United States, but a devastating critique of the genealogy of ideology in the American cultural establishment.