Damien Schlarb, Melville’s Wisdom
Religion, Skepticism and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21798090 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Caroline Hildebrandt (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Transatlantica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1765-2766 • E-ISSN: 1765-2766 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/transatlantica.19583 |
| OpenAlex | W4311786426 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
If romantic literature is the aesthetic expression of Christianity's encounter with modernity, Herman Melville's writings is a modern literary exegesis of wisdom literature," Damien Schlarb asserts in the conclusion to his book Melville 's Wisdom (179). Schlarb aims at appraising anew Melville's antebellum writings and his early poetry (the Battle-Pieces collection) to delineate the author's "intellectual impulse within modernity to re-engage the Bible with the express goal of articulating its function as a storehouse of cultural and moral guidance for a new age while divesting it of institutional authoritarianism" (180). To Schlarb, modernity suffers from an inner paradox, which is the "simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture", a paradox that Melville navigates, according to Schlarb, by returning again and again "to the shores of biblical wisdom" (3)-that is, engaging with the wisdom books of the Bible. Schlarb focuses more particularly on the presence of the Book of Job, the Book of Proverbs, and the Book of Ecclesiastes in Melville's writings, which the author references more than any other set of biblical texts. To Schlarb, they act as moral authority and guide in a time of crisis in Melville's writings. Melville's writings articulate a literary commentary on the Bible, exploring the links between religion, skepticism and literature. Melville thus helps "forge modern literature into a new mode of exegesis" (180), a mode of exegesis which refuses Enlightenment Manichean dichotomies between truth and untruth, while also avoiding "quasi
Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Skepticism · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |