...Gordon E. Bigelow Copyright © 1970 by Duke University Press 1970 THE PROBLEM OF SYMBOLIST FORM IN MELVILLE’S “BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER’’ By GORDONE. BIGELOW One proffers another critique of Melville’s “Bartleby” with some...

...Christopher W. Sten Copyright © 1974 by Duke University Press 1974 BARTLEBY THE TRANSCENDENTALIST MELVILLE’S DEAD LETTER TO EMERSON By CHRISTOPHERW. STEN In his essay “The Transcendentalist” (1843), Emerson remarked that he...

... of Dillingham, is to mistake the nature of Melville’s art and seriously “reduce” individual tales. In the case of “Bartleby,” for instance, Dillingham overlooks Melville’s strategic reference to Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestley and decides, on the basis of the narrator’s apprehensiveness...

...- cal confusion rather than alleviating it. Striving to say something new, Dil- lingham merely adds a few more “readings” to an already cumbersome pile. Most of Dillingham’s readings are original; one must say that for them. He suggests that Melville’s “use of the food metaphor” in “Bartleby...

... into the cate- gory of elegiac romance. In their surface characteristics they have an extremely broad range, a diversity which has made it difficult to discover their underlying similarity. The canon of elegiac romance includes very short works, such as Melville’s “Bartleby,” Poe’s “Fall...

... to the poor protagonist of “Bartleby the ScrivenerReniemhrunce of Things Past must go as well, for the counterpoint of narrator and hero obtains only in the opening portion devoted to Swann, and the narrator’s sympathetic estimate is scarcely mitigated there-nor is it able to forestall his subse...

...; to deemphasize them, in the manner of Dillingham, is to mistake the nature of Melville’s art and seriously “reduce” individual tales. In the case of “Bartleby,” for instance, Dillingham overlooks Melville’s strategic reference to Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestley and decides, on the basis...

... and certainly presents an observant narrator, but where is Ishmael’s hero worship and loss? (And how can we seriously compare the narrator’s function in regard DANIEL T. O’HARA 311 to the poor protagonist of “Bartleby the ScrivenerReniemhrunce of Things...

... Plotinus Plinlimmon” (p. go)? Is it Pierre who insists “that never,, never would he be able to em- brace Isabel with the mere brotherly embrace” (p. 94)? Does Pierre really see Guido’s The Cenci at a gallery? Is the narrator of “Bartleby” “none other than Washington Irving” (p. 122...

... artistically” (Pa Predictably, this worn-out approach gets us nowhere: the resultant inter- pretations (which cannot always be disentangled from needless summary) are dismayingly unoriginal. Nobody for two decades has needed to be told that the lawyer in “Bartleby” takes a “prudent...

... protagonists are suicidal, from Tommo to Billy Budd. Such characters as Taji, Ahab, and Pierre are obviously suicides, but the death urge is apparent in all of Mel- ville’s other protagonists, even if it shows itself symbolically or in an oblique manner. Benito Cereno, Bartleby, and Billy Budd...

...- vised as carillonist, and his tower is felled by an earthquake. The hero of Bartleby, ejected from a snug little necropolis-the Dead Letter Office-tries to build up another microcosm by sheer negation: he stays behind a screen in a lawyer’s office, refuses to work or to leave the premises...

... in Shulman’s. Although WaZden gets a paragraph in the chapter on “Bartleby,” it does not play even a minor role in a book entitled Social Criticism and Nineteenth-Century American Fictions. How is this possible? Is there any single work in any language or any culture that is a more trenchant...

... . Correspondence . Edited by Horth Lynn . Evanston, IL : Northwestern University Press . Melville Herman . 2016 . “Billy Budd,” “Bartleby,” and Other Stories . New York : Penguin . Orlemanski Julie . 2019 . “ Who Has Fiction? Modernity, Fictionality, and the Middle Ages .” New...

... Baudelaire seized upon in Poe and made most profoundly his own. (64-5) The intransigence of the logic of Poe’s heroes, for Cacciari, is also reflected in Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and its fullest expression is in Kafka. If Benjamin is willing to allow that Kafka offers us...

... to Noah’s endeavors comes about at the instigation of Satan, who tells her, “And thou do after thy husband read, /Thou and thy children will all be dead . . .” (12 1-22).6 The disobedience of the Wife of Bath involves more than the passive failure to acquiesce. She is no Bartleby, and although...

... that the rebelliousness is a bit more explicit: “He was tempted not to fulfilling” is one shade away from Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.” While the earlier poem is limpid, this one possesses a slippery, disorderly grammar that is part of the speaker’s insubordina- tion. Is he not at all tempted to fulfill...

... (the inner time of one’s life) in an analysis of Hayri İrdal, protagonist of The Time Regulation Institute and human rebuke to the logic of progress. A Turkish Bartleby, Hayri possesses the ability to “trip time” up (185), instead of being tripped by it—a crucial difference between the original Turkish...

... Melville’s Bartleby, who seems more enticing for some critics because his indolence is accompanied by willfulness) stand in for a wholesale embrace of thoughtlessness, desirelessness, and actionlessness. In contrast to such existential vacuity, Mansfield Park places real value on periodic release from...

..., identity, and production, is also the question posed by many romantic works, read in the context of today. They frame that question like Bartleby rather than Dora, by just saying no. I use that contrast to underscore the perfect diffidence and obliqueness of the negative gesture, qualities...