The tone of capital, the color of chaos, the figure of pain, the texture of philosophy: among the characteristic stylistic features of Herman Melville’s prose and poetry is the precision with which he gives aesthetic form to the concepts and problems that drive his work. In recent years, scholars such as Sianne Ngai, Christopher Freeburg, Michael Snediker, Samuel Otter, and many others have revivified the category of “style” as a crucial analytic category for reading Melville’s work, one which accounts for the ways that Melville combines aesthetic experimentation with some of his strangest and most radical thinking about philosophy, art, faith, and politics. This panel is organized both to engage such approaches to the question of style in Melville’s work and to propose new ways of thinking about how Melville’s style materializes thinking about faith and secularism, law and politics, philosophy and art. Each of these papers takes up a particular stylistic form drawn from Melville’s work – from portraiture and masquerade to epistemologies of conspiracy and allegories of law – moving beyond the thematics of Melville’s work to consider how he mobilizes aesthetic style in the service of his most incisive political and philosophical critques.

In “Melville and the Style of Conspiracy,” Justine Murison will argue that the conspiratorial mode of American culture is deeply rooted in both a secularism that fails to manage credulity and an epistemology that treats style as fact. Noting the unsettling sense of recognition that comes from reading Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade in a moment when conspiracies about vaccines, elections, and elite cabals have warped and fractured our shared reality, Murison argues that Melville captures something essential and recurrent in the American style of conspiratorial thinking. Paying close attention to the episodes in which an “herb doctor” sells natural cures to passengers whose skepticism and credulity prove to be closely aligned, she argues that Melville was particularly good at capturing how secularism manages both skepticism and religious belief but fails to generate a language of confidence. Where Murison examines how Melville’s Confidence-Man exposes crises of secularism through a stylistic confrontation between epistemologies of belief and doubt, Michael Jonik will examine how that text’s repeated pairings of “unphilosophical dupes” with “metaphysical scamps” also challenges the style of philosophical dialogue. In “Melville’s Dialogic Thinking: Philosophical Styles in The Confidence-Man,” Jonik will propose that the “masquerade” becomes a mode of philosophical thinking in itself. As particular characters re-enact the dialogues and disputations of Cicero and Lucian, Berkeley and Hume, the text begins to scrutinize the form of a dialectical process that tends toward the revelation of the philosopher’s position. Rather than endorsing any one philosophical position, The Confidence-Man stages a performance of living ideas in dialogic strife, in which dissembling and deferral, missed encounter and interruption, eavesdropping and ventriloquizing, all becomes styles of philosophy in their own right, without the possibility of dialectical reconciliation.

For Matthew Crow, the stakes of Melville’s stylistic experimentations lie in his probing of and legal theory, as these disclose the monarchist foundations of Anglo-American law. Specifically, in “Legal and Aesthetic Theory in Billy Budd; or, ‘Something of the Royal Remains,’” Crow argues that Melville’s experimentation with allegory give imaginative form to what Eric Santner has theorized as “the royal remains,” that surplus flesh that migrated from the king to the people. Finally, in “American Paragone,” Jamie Luis Parra examines the mobile relations among three forms – painting, photography, and writing – in Melville’s Pierre to argue that the stylistic play with portraiture and arts of the face are central to Melville’s subversion of novelistic characterization along with the ideology of personhood that underlies it. Ultimately, Parra argues, Melville’s later work may be understood as organized around an impossible desire to create a linguistic style capable of reshaping the world.

Format:

Each of the participants will speak for 15 minutes, followed by a response leading into discussion and Q&A. The panel will require overhead projection, and we will make abstracts available on the MLA Commons and the Melville Society web site before the conference.