• American Studies
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.27-56
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• 2020

This paper attempts to interpret the meaning of nine gams in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It approaches the topic from an organizational identity perspective. It is the theory which asserts the importance of the reference group in the formation of group members' organizational identity. This paper views the gams as the reference groups for the sailors of the Pequod and shows what meanings or questions each gam presents to them. It divides the nine gams into three groups according to their functions in the organizational sense. This paper argues that the extremely dangerous quest of the Pequod is not led by the captain only, but the sailors, who are given many chances to make their decisions after having gams, eventually choose to obey and follow their leader. The tragic end is partly what they choose, after all.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1123-1137
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• 2009

Revisiting the horror of slave mutiny in nineteenth century America via Julia Kristeva's concept of abject, this essay examines abject fear in Amasa Delano and Babo's subversive act to deceive Delano in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno." Babo, the slave, exercises subversive power, thereby reversing racial hierarchy aboard the slave ship-the San Dominick. Babo's ability to mimic and control racial stereotypes exposes how nineteenth-century racial hierarchy was only a social fiction, which becomes the very source of Delano's fear. Delano's dread belies upon the possible disruption of social order triggered by Babo'sblack rebellion. In order to repress his fear, Delano consciously and unconsciously attempts to re-inscribe white dominion and reaffirm black inferiority and stereotypes by means of rationalizing the disturbing signs he witnesses on the San Dominick. When Delano discovers the realsituation of the ship, he must relinquish the abject resonance that disturbs the previous racial order. Employing a legal document, Delano re-inscribes the official position of the blacks as slaves, defining them as violent savages, and thereby silences Babo. However, Melville's text is not a testament to white power. "Benito Cereno" actually endorses abject instability to challenge racial hierarchies through the poignant image of Babo's dead gaze in the last scene of the novella. Thus, "Benito Cereno" exemplifies the recurring power of abject as a threat to social hierarchy and as a constant reminder of the falsity and insecurity of a social order.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.585-600
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• 2018

Over the last three decades, the field of American Studies has increasingly paid attention to transnational approaches in an effort to diversify and expand the field's concerns beyond the narrow sense of the nation-state in today's globalizing world. Yet, the mediation of the transnational requires a careful analysis of the nation that is still in transit. In this context, this essay examines Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851) as a case study that vividly shows how reading American literature and culture through transnationalism not only offers new interpretations of canonical texts, but also helps us to better understand the historical roots and cultural contexts of contemporary issues such as global labor and migration, US citizenship and racial justice. To address the complexity of the text's circulation and reproduction, coupled with US national ideology and cultural conditions, I first turn to the canonization of Melville's Moby-Dick during the Cold War era as a national project and then explore the possibilities of transnational readings by focusing on the politics of race and global capitalism in the nineteenth century whaling industry. In doing so, I argue that critical transnationalism allows readers to keep questioning about their own understanding of race, nation, and cultural identity while remaining attentive to the destructive force of US imperialism and global capitalism in the twenty-first century.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.787-812
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• 2011

This essay aims to explore Herman Melville's recognition and resolution of the vicious link between law and violence in his posthumous Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). In order to investigate the issues, this essay refers to Freud, Benjamin, Derrida, Lacan, and Žižek, all perceptive to the uncanny affinity of law and violence. Especially, Žižek's arguments of "superego" as an embodiment of cruel and destructive violence supplementing the official law and of "love" as an ethical possibility beyond the limit of the problematic law are introduced in this study to make Melville's reflection of the inseparableness between law and violence much clearer. John Claggart and Captain Vere embody the legal (superegoic) violence. Claggart even procurs secret enjoyment, in the name of maintaining positive law. Billy Budd discloses another violence defending his justness according to natural law. However, Melville suggests the possibility of suspending the problematic tie of law/violence through "love," as portrayed at the last part of the story. The two final words from Billy and Vere, as a sort of delayed dialogue between them after the event of their secret interview before Billy's hanging, suggest that they finally distance from the obscene nightly law of superego-respectively from outward punitiveness toward Vere and from inward punishment for Vere's excessive enforcement of Billy's hanging-and identify each other's lack as their own. Their love implicated in the last words is for the real other-in Lacan's sense-who discloses the constitutive lack or incompleteness of beings and aporia of the law. This essay's examination of Melville's representations about the superegoic violence as the (im-)possible condition of law and the possibility of withdrawing from it would help us recognize Billy Budd, Sailor as the author's own last word for the possible vision of love cutting the vicious knot of law/violence.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.557-575
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• 2010

Pierre breaks the rules of convention and acquires the 'potential not to do.' To transform the traditional hero into the new potential subject, Pierre moves from his hometown, Saddle Meadows, New York City to the dungeon of the city prison and creates three different relationships that symbolize what ideology and principles repress his mind and behavior and how he handles them. Firstly, in Saddle Meadows, Pierre has a narcissistic relationship with his mother, Mary, who teaches him the principles of American manhood and forces him to be docile: he has to obey Mary's order that a man should be a gentleman. Therefore, since he does not know his potential, he does not create his own work and is involved in plagiarism. Secondly, in New York City, Pierre creates an associated relationship with Isabel, his half-sister, who represents an ambiguous and mysterious character and has the 'potential not to do' that leads Pierre to destroys the beliefs of American manhood and performs the potential to do. Consequently, Pierre puts himself in an extreme situation and is absolutely liberated from the influence of his dead father, who unconsciously controls Pierre's behavior and thoughts. Thus, he makes a dissociated relationship with his father. In the dungeon, he physically dies, but symbolically metamorphoses into Isabel, so that he blurs the differences between Isabel and himself. Furthermore, he never stays in his own way: in this on-going process, Pierre cannot determine which is good or bad, legitimate or illegitimate and life or death.