SUPPORT THE MELVILLE SOCIETY – SUPPORT THE BICENTENNIAL DRIVE

As you know, your annual dues provide you with a subscription to our award-winning journal Leviathan. What you may not know is that the Society also supports biennial international conferences and numerous outreach programs. In recent decades, The Melville Society has grown in size, diversity, and scope, and it now exceeds the boundaries of the typical single author society. Unfortunately, dues alone do not support our publications, conferences, and outreach, and the Melville Society must now ask for your additional financial support.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to The Melville Society, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, during our Bicentennial Drive commemorating the 200th anniversary of Herman Melville’s birth. 

You may contribute now to help establish a new endowment in support of the range of the Society’s programs and activities, or give to sustain our Henry Murray Endowment, which supports Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and other Society publications.

• Bicentennial Fund: to establish an endowment to support the full range of the Society’s Programs and activities. 
• Henry Murray Endowment: to support the operating costs for Leviathan and other present and future publications of the society.  

Tax-deductible donations can be made using Paypal by visiting our Funds and Endowments page, or checks may be sent to:

The Melville Society
c/o Steven Olsen-Smith, Treasurer
Department of English, Boise State University
Boise, ID 83725-1525

Checks should be payable to the Melville Society, specifying the name of the fund earmarked for the donation in the memo line of the check.

Announcements

Available Soon

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies

Volume 21, Number 3 - October 2019

The third of the four issues of "Melville at 200" being published
in Melville's Bicentennial Year

image will be updated when available on Project Muse
click image to enlarge

Leviathan 21.3, our third “Melville at 200” special issue, is coming soon, on Project Muse and through the mail to print subscribers! It begins with a special section on “Rereading The Confidence-Man Today,” edited by Rodrigo Lazo and including essays by Samuel Otter, Justine Murison, Meredith Farmer, Peter J. Bellis, Matt Seybold, and Russ Castronovo. The articles include Nicholas Spengler on the “Dog-King” in “The Encantadas”; Cate Louise Mahoney on mourning in The Confidence-Man; Thomas Dikant on Melville’s Victorian war poetry; and Dennis Berthold on Derwent’s conversations in Clarel. The issue includes a poem by Helen Steadman, Dawn Coleman’s “Books in Brief,” and reviews of Michael Jonik’s Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, by Meredith Farmer, and László Krasznahorkai’s and Ornan Rotem’s The Manhattan Project: A Literary Diary Presented as Twelve Chance Encounters or Coincidences Alongside a Photographic Essay by Ornan Rotem, by Kevin J. Hayes. The issue concludes with All Astir and a photo essay on Mystic Seaport Museum’s 34th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon, by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards. ​For information about subscribing to Leviathan, click here.

Robert  K. Wallace has shared his illustrated blog essays covering all five days of the recent 12th International Melville Society Conference held in New York celebrating Melville's Bicentennial. To read the essays, you can click here or click the "Blogs" link above in the main menu. Thank you Professor Wallace!

MLA Conference 2020
Seattle, WA - January 9-12

Melville, Gesture, Love

“Thus Spake Zarathustra,” writes Agamben, is “the ballet of a humanity that has lost its gestures.” Melville’s corpus, it may be imagined, presents a ballet of gestures in the felt absence (thus spake “Bartleby’s” flummoxed narrator) of humanity. Ahab and Pip, Vere and Billy Budd (for that matter, everyone and Billy), Ishmael and Queequeg, Pierre and Isabel: love circuits through Melville’s characters like an Emersonian force, illuminating what in Melvillean characterology seems least substantive, least persuasive. It is arguably love’s failure along characterological lines that may draw our attention to its constitutive gestures, the frequency with which it surfaces across Melville’s oeuvre as a specifically textual matter: figuratively jubilant, expressively incessant spume recalling Werner Hamacher’s definition of gesture as “what remains of language after meaning is withdrawn from it,” or Roland Barthes’s understanding of gesture as a “quantum of phantasmatic brilliance, of desire, or of pleasure.” This Melville Society panel is envisioned as an opportunity for reconsidering both the contours and qualities of love’s gestures and our own love, as critics and theorists, of the gesture. After all, the concept of gesture has for some time gestured toward something strange and strangely alive at the heart of Melville’s enterprise—this isn’t unfamiliar terrain, and yet the term’s tenacity and continued salience suggests that Melvillean gesture (or our relation to it) has not yet fully done its office. How might the unfixed relation of these terms speak to the historical haunting of Battle-Pieces, to Clarel’s experiments in fidelity and scale, to the antiquary geology of “The Encantadas”? Or only somewhat more straightforwardly, the sumptuous queerness of Melville’s attachment to Hawthorne, not to mention the sumptuousness of what Newton Arvin describes as Melville’s “love of rare adjectives.”

Visit Our Media Pages

Featuring Videos from Our International Conferences and a Poetry Reading by Gordon Poole

Tim Marr reading from Clarel at Mar Saba

Gordon Poole reading "In a Bye-Canal," a poem from the "Fruit of Travel Long Ago" section of  Timoleon

Neapolitan Folk Songs and Dances at the Eighth International Melville Conference, Rome, June 2011. 

Photo Gallery of the June 2019 New York Conference on Flickr

Thanks to the photographers and participants in 12th International Conference in New York last June
for sharing their memories and photos. .

Click here or on the photo below to view the New York album in the Melville Society Flickr gallery