ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

Inventing America ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

Edmundo O’Gorman Popular Culture Studies ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

 The Copernican Revolution  The “Discovery” of Columbus  America as an Invention  America as Europe’s Dream ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

American Studies ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

Perry Miller ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

Richard Poirier ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

Reflections on America ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

When you get there, there isn't any there there. --Gertrude Stein ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

America is striving to win power over the sum total of things, complete and absolute mastery of nature in all its aspects.... To occupy God's place, to repeat his deeds, to recreate and organize a man-made cosmos according to man-made laws of reason, foresight and efficiency: that is America's ultimate objective.... It destroys whatever is primitive, whatever grows in disordered profusion or evolved through patient mutation. --Robert Jungk, Tomorrow is Already Here Popular Culture Studies ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

If America didn't have Blacks it would be Switzerland. —Attributed to Roy Blount ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

American life is a powerful solvent. --George Santayana ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

"America's critical role in the planetization of humanity does seem to be that of the catalytic enzyme that breaks down all the traditional cultures of the world, be they Asiatic, Islamic, or European. With Disneyland in Paris and Tokyo, the United States is well on its way to dissolving all the world cultures, and I do not think any nativistic revolt of Islam will succeed in stopping it any more than Marxist-Leninism did." (79) --William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

For what underlay our clearing of the continent were the ancient fears and divisions that we brought to the New World along with the primitive precursors of the technology that would assist in transforming the continent. Haunted by these fears, driven by our divisions, we slashed and hacked at the wilderness we saw so that within three centuries of Cortes's penetration of the mainland a world millions of years in the making vanished into the voracious, insatiable maw of an alien civilization. Musing on this time scale, one begins to sense the enormity of what we brought to our entrance here. And one begins to sense also that it was here in America that Western man became loosed into a strange, ungovernable freedom so that what we now live amidst is the culminating artifact of the civilization of the West. --Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.... in most of the operations of mind, each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

America is therefore one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied, and are best applied. Nor is this surprising. The Americans do not read the work of Descartes, because their social conditions deter them from speculative studies; but they follow his maxims, because this same social condition naturally disposes their minds to adopt them. In the midst of the continual movement which agitates a democratic community, the tie which unites one generation to another is relaxed or broken; every man there readily loses all trace of the ideas of his forefathers, or takes no care about them.... Americans are constantly brought back to their own reason as the obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in his fellow man which is destroyed, but the disposition for trusting the authority of any man whatsoever. Every one shuts himself up in his own breast, and affects from that point to judge the world. --Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

The distinctive vice of the new world is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality like a blanket. Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always might "miss out on something." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

There is no country on earth where the "power-word," the magic-formula, the slogan or advertisement is more effective than in America. We Europeans laugh about this, but we forget that faith in the magical power of the word can move more than mountains. Christ himself was a word, the Word. We have become estranged from this psychology, but in the American it is still alive. It has yet to be seen what America will do with it. Thus the American presents a strange picture: A European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul. He shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor- spirits who reincarnate themselves in the newborn. There is a great psychological truth in this.... C. G. Jung, "Mind and Earth" Popular Culture Studies ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

The foreign land assimilates its conqueror. But unlike the Latin conquerors of Central and South America, the North Americans preserved their European standards with the most rigid Puritanism, though they could not prevent the souls of their Indian foes from becoming theirs. Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of its indigenous inhabitants. Thus, in the American, there is a discrepancy between conscious and unconscious that is not found in the European, a tension between an extremely high conscious level of culture and an unconscious primitivity. This tension forms a psychic potential which endows the American with an indomitable spirit of enterprise and an enviable enthusiasm which we in Europe do not know. The very fact that we still have our ancestral spirits, and that for us everything is steeped in history, keeps us in contact with our unconscious, but we are so caught in this contact and held so fast in the historical vice that the greatest catastrophes are needed to wrench us loose and to change our political behavior from what it was five hundred years ago. ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

Our contact with the unconscious chains us to the earth and makes it hard for us to move, and this is certainly no advantage when it comes to progressiveness and all the other desirable motions of the mind. Nevertheless I would not speak ill of our relation to good Mother Earth. Plurimi per transibunt; but he who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being. C. G. Jung, "Mind and Earth" ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America

OCTOBER 12, THE DISCOVERY. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it. --Mark Twain ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick America