Empiricism, Anatomy, Reality: Reading Herman Melville in the Menippean Tradition

Dissertation, The University of North Dakota (1993)
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Abstract

The purpose of the study is to draw together the art of Herman Melville, Menippean satire, and the empirical tradition in English and Scottish philosophy. Historical and biographical concerns serve as a background for exploring Melville's satire of Platonism, transcendentalism, and hermeneutic apriority. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Washington Irving are discussed in this respect. The dissertation also contains related fiction pieces. ;The dissertation develops several intertwined conceptions of analysis, drawing together an empirical critical basis derived from Ludwig Wittgenstein and "ordinary language philosophy," the notion of satire as criticism, and the exploration of these concepts through an examination of Herman Melville--an important figure in the tradition of Menippean satire. ;Central to Wittgenstein's conception of the world is that states of affairs or facts are independent of each other. The basic disconnectedness of all facts is the true state of the world. Language creates an illusion of relation--"belief in the causal nexus is superstition." The analysis of this superstition figures importantly in Melville's satire of various beliefs concerning reality, ontology, myth, ritual, ideology, philosophy, science, barbarism, and religion. William Blake, David Hume, Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton also call into question this belief in the "causal nexus." ;It was Wittgenstein's goal to make philosophy into a science. Wittgenstein asserted that the tradition of science moves toward an analytical dissolution of conceptual confusion, therefore true philosophy must become an activity of logical clarification. Literary criticism might also be made into a science and become an activity of logical clarification. In fact, the tradition of literature itself might be seen as a process of this clarification. Vladimir Nabokov, whose pedagogical technique emphasized particulars and details, was convinced of an evolution taking place in literature toward ampler perfection, subtlety, and precision. This process is apparent and deliberate in the tradition of what Northrop Frye calls the "anatomy" or Menippean satire. Of all the modes of literary or dialectical investigation, the "anatomy" is most deliberately and overtly the dialectical tradition of the science of literary inquiry. The "anatomy" is the process of language inquiring into itself. Accordingly, the dissertation is organized as an anatomy. There are three sections. The first section looks for Menippean patterns in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and in the art of Irving, Hawthorne, and Melville. The second section examines selected passages from Melville's novels where Melville uses satire to express an empirical perspective. In the third section this pattern of empirical observation and satirical expression is carried forward to examine Melville's legacy

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