Melville Society Panels at ALA 2021
American Literature Association
32nd Annual Conference
July 7-11, 2021
Westin Copley Place
10 Huntington Avenue Boston
“Thematizing ‘Becoming’ in the Work of Herman Melville” (in-person panel)
Chair: Lenora Warren, Lecturer at Ithaca College
"Becoming a ‘Blank’: Melville’s ‘Tartarus of Maids’ and the Diary of Paper Mill Worker Nancy Priest," Bridget M. Marshall, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
"Melville and the Dilemma of Modernity," Andrew Carlyle Urban, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“Becoming-Whale: Fabulous Multiplicities in Melville’s Moby-Dick," Ross Martin, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"Race and the Subversion of Conversion in 'Benito Cereno'," Justina Torrance, Harvard University
Roundtable on “Melville’s Anatomies at 20” (virtual option)
Samuel Otter’s Melville’s Anatomies (1999) was a defining text in Melville studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. Exploring Melville’s novels from Typee to Pierre, Otter identified what were to be defining features of Melville criticism in the new century: race, sexuality and the body, the relationship between the human and nonhuman world, visual aesthetics, and a blend of rigorous close reading and deep cultural immersion in considering Melville’s work and life.
This roundtable, initially planned for the 2020 ALA conference, celebrates somewhat belatedly the 20th anniversary of this milestone in Melville studies, which has done so much to shape the scholarship that has followed it. The roundtable will be moderated by Brian Yothers, the current Editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and will include contributions by a distinguished group of Melville scholars: John Bryant, Founding Editor of Leviathan, Wyn Kelley, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Robert S. Levine, and Cody Marrs. Samuel Otter, who in addition to being the author of Melville’s Anatomies was Editor of Leviathan from 2014-2019, will be the respondent.
