Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man - Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Re

Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man - Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Re

Goldner, Loren

Paperback

Series: Marx/Third Millennium

Literary Criticism19th Century United States HistoryGeneral Art

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ISBN10: 0970030827
ISBN13: 9780970030825
Publisher: Queequeg Pubn
Published: Sep 1 2005
Pages: 292
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.66 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Class Struggle and the Adamic Imagination in Herman Melville: In Europe, after 1848, bourgeois consciousness in revolt sought a new universal in the working class but soon found itself in the orbit of the state civil service; in America, bourgeois consciousness in revolt found a new universal in what Melville called antemosaic reality, Queequeg, embodied in the multiracial working class, the Anacharsis Cloots deputation, in radical antithesis to the state. Herman Melville (1818-1891) came to this perspective in the feverish production of six novels of the sea, culminating in Moby Dick, in the 1846-1851 period. As the whaling ship Pequod was destroyed by Moby Dick, the Indian harpooner Tashtego nailed a red flag to the mast, also catching the wing of a sky-hawk, with its imperial beak. The 1848-1850 conjuncture in the Atlantic world witnessed the birth of communism (Marx), modern art (Courbet, Flaubert), the end of classical political economy, and the formulation of the entropy law, or Second Law of Thermodynamics. Their simultaneity was not accidental, and Melville's work echoes each of them. 1848, in Europe, had been the year of the eruption of the dangerous classes; in America, it marked the end of interclassist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian populism, over the slavery issue. The link between communism, modernism, neoclassical economics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the beginning of the dissolution of the object in the dream worlds of a new mass consumption. This study attempts to situate Melville's works in this convergence.

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