Course Description

Historicizing Bartleby the Scrivener in a Nuclear, Post-9/11World

Instructor: Dan Zins, PhD

Herman Melville’s widely anthologized story has fascinated and baffled readers ever since its publication. This discussion class will compare and contrast our own ingenious analyses of this puzzling and prophetic tale, its possible submerged meanings, and its narrator’s continual frustrations with his inscrutable scrivener, with the amazing variety of interpretations that have been advanced by literary scholars and critics. Intertextual insights of Melville’s contemporaries Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Douglass, and Wendell Berry (our contemporary Thoreau) et al. illuminate the profound relevance of Melville’s masterpiece for our own age of pervasive historical amnesia, self-deception, self-subjection, solipsism, economic exploitation/predation, paralyzing fear, and individual/national insecurity.