Episode Description:
In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Joseph Allen Boone, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Southern California, to discuss his new book from Columbia University Press, The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife Across the Arts. According to Boone, we are living through a second Melville revival. The first, in the 1920s, was engineered by critics who pulled Melville out of obscurity and streamlined him into an American answer to European modernism. Our current renaissance, which is a bit weirder and more whimsical, is being driven by artists working in painting, collage, performance, musical theater, video, fiction, and more besides who are remixing and repurposing Melville's work in innovative ways.
Our conversation works through why Melville has been “having a moment” over the last few decades. Part of the answer he offers is thematic, since a novel like Moby Dick touches on globalism, extraction, ecological collapse, and racial encounter—topics that feel incredibly resonant with our current moment despite the fact the work was published in 1851. The other part is shaped by its form and might be a bit more surprising. Despite its view in the popular imagination as a weighty canonical tome, Moby-Dick opens with a dictionary page, moves through etymologies and epigraphs, drops in a sermon, launches into Shakespearean soliloquy, a play script, legal affidavits, and parodic scientific taxonomy—absorbing what feels like the whole media explosion of the 1840s and 50s along the way. Boone calls this aesthetic hybridity, and it is one the reasons Melville is legible as a companion to artists who work in our era of pastiche, collage, mashup, and remix. We also get into the pedagogical stakes, including an inspiring call for more arts integration and multimodal approaches to teaching canonical works.
Melville’s formal promiscuity could be seen as an exploration of the way form shapes content, which is the same question contemporary multimedia artists are asking about their creative use of diverse media and materials.
Boone borrows the counterpane scene as his governing metaphor. Ishmael wakes unable to distinguish the crazy quilt from Queequeg’s tattooed arm, and that indistinction, where the parts refuse to resolve into a pattern but cohere anyway, describes both Melville’s method and the way his work is getting remixed and repurposed.
Consider how you might bring aesthetic hybridity into your classroom. What different mediums and materials could you bring into the patchwork quilt of your own curriculum?
The reason literary history reads as dead is that we treat it as exclusively retrospective. Boone’s counterclaim is that it is also progressive, continually reconstituted by whoever is currently reading and remixing it.
The project of extending a text’s afterlife cannot be accomplished through genuflection and submission. Instead, readers and creators who engage with it should see themselves as participating in an ongoing production of its meaning and legacy.
Consider what it might look like to have your students participate in the ongoing production of a text’s literary afterlife. How might you balance scaffolding their ability to engage with the text while giving them agency to take it new places?
Absence functions as invitation. Melville gives Mrs. Ahab two sentences in the whole of Moby-Dick, and artists have built collage cycles, a stage production, and a novel out of that gap. Reading what is not present can be a powerful act of critical framing and reading.
The same logic drives the queer readings of Pierre, where James Creech’s criticism, Maurice Sendak’s illustrations, and Elizabeth Schultz’s reading of a broom closet in the plates each produce something that is in the text and not in the text at once. Creative and critical readings provide us with the ability to construct new narratives that complicate the legacy of traditional works.
Consider the gaps that exist in the literary works that you teach. Who is not featured or mentioned? Who appears briefly and why? How can you invite students to explode those glimpses into something bigger?
Regular readers of Becoming Literary will recognize some of my favorite throughlines. This is a conversation about how we can move beyond treating canon as a collection of revered, pedestal placed texts and start treating it as a site of debate and dialogue. It is an invitation to see hybrid interpretive work as a legitimate mode of literary knowledge production, and an opportunity to move the field forward without leaving its past behind. I hope you enjoy the episode and answer its call!
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