We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The nineteenth century was the first era of “big data” in the modern world, and American literary texts published during this time, such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), offer an aesthetic reframing of how individuals and institutions within a culture of data use information at scale to claim authority over knowledge and, by extension, power over people. Moby-Dick also gestures toward the ways that African and African American bodies were subjected to the most brutal regimes of quantification that the nineteenth century had to offer in the form of the transatlantic and intra-American slave trade. One of the major problems facing American literary studies and digital humanities today is the question of how to excavate and explicate the quantitative turn of earlier centuries as we seek to better understand the cultures of data we live in today. The best initial response to this problem is not to begin with a specific digital tool per se, but to build a set of guiding principles for how to critically approach data, media, and power from within a context that recognizes the distinctive contributions of literary texts as aesthetic objects. This essay models one such approach to do so.
A volume on the Bible and literature affords an opportunity to explore the conjunction of these terms in relation to a writer whose great work Moby-Dick (1851) – the story of the hunting-down of a white whale by an obsessed sea captain – came to have, after Melville’s lifetime, a mythic role for his nation and for the Western world. Melville’s life (1819–91) spanned the nineteenth century and he was one of its outstanding thinkers. His work throughout is profoundly influenced by biblical texts. This essay, noting the influence of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, highlights both their capacity to help Melville think through the problems of his age, and their influence on his understanding of the power of story and the capacities of language. After a brief account of Melville’s formative years, the essay considers a long passage from Moby-Dick for the complexity of its resonances with Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. A discussion of the role of Wisdom in Melville’s long dramatic poem Clarel follows, with emphasis on the book of Job. A late sketch, “Daniel Orme” offers, through the figure of Daniel, material for a final reflection on Melville’s role as thinker and visionary for his society.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.