Special Session

American / Adaptation and Translation Studies

Andrew Knighton (California State University - Los Angeles)
akni@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This panel explores the continuing relevance of Herman Melville via exploration of creative adaptations, homages, and recontextualizations of his works since the critical rediscovery of the author a century ago. More contemporary Melville “revivals” considered here may include not only literary encounters with the author and his legacy, but also discourses literary, visual, philosophical, cinematic, theatrical, or otherwise.

Since the 1920s “Melville Revival,” Melville’s body of work has spawned innumerable adaptations and rethinkings across a broad range of creative and other discursive practices. Whether reanimated in the “high art” domains of the opera or avant-garde painting, the more popular worlds of The Flintstones, Mastodon, and Led Zeppelin, or the imaginations of innumerable modern and contemporary poets and novelists, Melville’s characters, quandaries, and provocations persist. Those who wrestle with them continue to experiment with new ways of reading Melville – or even reading new “Melvilles” – that have retroactively shaped our relationships to the primary works themselves. And such emergent creative entanglements with Melville’s texts have opened up compelling questions about affect, time and space, the relationship of literature to other arts, and the modern and postmodern experiences of being human.

This panel aims to explore how the abundant afterlife of Melville’s works inspires radical ways of thinking that extend beyond literary history – manifesting instead in creative interventions tackling some of the most pressing political, aesthetic, and philosophical debates of our age. While Moby-Dick is often perhaps most prominent in such a discussion, the panel welcomes consideration of a broad range of engagements with Melville’s other novels, short fiction, poetry, and essays, in hopes of assessing anew the vital problematics that obsessed him – and continue to absorb us, as we enter the third century of the Melville era.