Handsomely Done
Aesthetics, Politics, and Media After Melville

Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz (Edited by), Sorin Radu Cucu (Contributions by), Roland Vegso (Contributions by), Emily Apter (Contributions by), Walter Johnston (Contributions by), Barbara Natalie Nagel (Contributions by), Paul Downes (Contributions by), David Copenhafer (Contributions by), Jacques Lezra (Contributions by), John Hamilton (Contributions by), Peter Szendy (Contributions by), Jean-Luc Nancy (Contributions by)

9780810139732

Paperback / softback, published 15 April 2019

264 pages, 8 black & white images
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.375 kg

Handsomely Done: Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville brings together leading and emerging scholars from comparative literature, critical theory, and media studies to examine Melville's works in light of their ongoing afterlife and seemingly permanent contemporaneity. The volume explores the curious fact that the works of this most linguistically complex and seemingly most “untranslatable” of authors have yielded such compelling translations and adaptations as well as the related tendency of Melville's writing to flash into relevance at every new historical-political conjuncture.

The volume thus engages not only Melville-reception across media (Jorge Luis Borges, John Huston, Jean-Luc Godard, Led Zeppelin, Claire Denis) but also the Melvillean resonances and echoes of various political events and movements, such as the Attica Uprising, the Red Army Faction, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. This consideration of Melville's afterlife opens onto theorizations of intermediality, un/translatability, and material intensity even as it also continually faces the most concrete and pressing questions of history and politics. 

Handsomely Done presents readers with a Melville who is a philologist and even a cinematographer, but also a potent political thinker, a thinker of capital and credit as well as of resistance, insubordination, and escape.

• Introduction: Handsomely Done, Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz
• Part 1. Melville and the Limits of the Political
• 1. Moby-Dick and Perpetual War, Sorin Radu Cucu and Roland Vé
  gsö
  
• 2. Bartleby Politics, Emily Apter
• 3. Land and See: The Theatricality of the Political in Schmitt and Melville, Walter Johnston
• 4. The Coward’
  s Paradox: Pip’
  s Weak Resistance, Barbara Natalie Nagel
• 5. From Lima to Attica: Benito Cereno, the Nixon Recordings, and the 1971, Prison Uprising, Paul Downes
• Part 2. Audio-Visual Melville
• 6. “
  A Sound Not Easily to Be Verbally Rendered”
  : The Literary Acoustic of Billy Budd, David Copenhafer
• 7. Necrophilology: Still/Hearing Bartleby, Jacques Lezra
• 8. Whaling in the Abyss between Melville and Zeppelin: Alex Itin’
  s Orson Whales, John Hamilton
• 9. The Confidence-Image (Melville, Godard, Deleuze), Peter Szendy
• 10. Belle Trouvaille: Aesthetics and Philology in Billy Budd (after Beau Travail), Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz
• 11. A-religion, Jean-Luc Nancy