Tag Archives: Herman Melville

Melville’s Typee (1846) and the Case for Civilization

Thomas F. Bertonneau

from The Brussels Journal, May 19, 2009
My subject is Herman Melville, and more specifically Melville’s case for civilization, but I would like to approach his Typee (1846), where he makes that case, through a preamble having to do with the figure against whose arguments Melville stakes his own: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
I
There is a shadow-side in the [...]

Published: May 27, 2009 | Posted in General | Also tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

D. H. Lawrence on Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo

The TOQ Classics Corner

“There is an invisible hand that grasps my heart and prevents it opening too much to these strangers. They are beautiful, they are like children, they are generous: but they are more than this. They are far off, and in their eyes is an easy darkness of the soft, uncreate past. In a way, they [...]

Published: May 24, 2009 | Posted in General | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The American System vs. the White Race:
D. H. Lawrence on Moby Dick

The TOQ Classics Corner

“What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.
“And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt [...]

Published: May 21, 2009 | Posted in General | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments
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