Description
From Laurie Anderson's Songs And Stories From Moby Dick And Led Zeppelin's Moby Dick To The More Recent Emoji Dick, A Retelling Of The Novel Using Only Emojis, And Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, Traces Of Melville Are Everywhere. In The Melville Effect, Joseph Allen Boone Explores This Phenomenon By Looking At The Work Of Contemporary Writers, Filmmakers, And Artists Who Are Channeling Melville Either As Source Of Inspiration, Artistic Co-conspirator, Or Spur For Self-critique. Boone Describes How Contemporary Literary, Cinematic, And Artistic Experiments Connect With Melville's Aesthetics: His Mingling Of Genres And Borrowings From Popular And High Culture. These Characteristics Of Melville's Work Anticipate The Shifting Horizons Of Art In Our Own Moment Shaped By New Forms Of Media, Multimedia, And Digital Technology And New Conceptions Of Audience And Authorship. Ultimately, Boone Suggests That The Interplay Between Melville, His Many Legacies, His Afterlives, And Contemporary Culture Invites Us To Reconsider How We Do And Use Literary History, And How We Might Better Engage The Past To Bring That History Into Vibrant Contact With Present And Future Horizons. In Separate Chapters, Boone Examines These Works And Their Aesthetics Via Specific Themes: Literary History, Gender, Obsession, Perversity, And Environmentalism. Thus, Even Though Melville Himself Had Few Female Characters, Many Contemporary Evocations Focus On Constructions Of Femininity And The Gendering Of Material Labor. In The Chapter, Size Matters, Boone Examines How Artists Like Orson Welles Have Been Obsessed With Melville And Drawn To Obsessive Projects. Contemporary Writers, Artists, And Filmmakers Have Also Looked To The Homoeroticism In Melville's Work To Meditate On The Larger Ramifications Of The Category Of The Perverse. Boone's Epilogue Examines Such Works As Moby-duck, Which Recounts The Migration Of Plastic Bath Toys Across The Globe's Oceans To Examine How Melville's Prescient Work Understood The Waste Products Of Industry, Species Depletion, And Planetary Yearnings-- Provided By Publisher.
