The Silence of Bartleby

The Silence of Bartleby
ISBN-10
0801495938
ISBN-13
9780801495939
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
206
Language
English
Published
1989
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Author
Dan McCall

Description

In The Silence of Bartleby, Dan McCall proposes a new reading of Herman Melville's classic short tale Bartleby, The Scrivener. McCall discuss in detail how Bartleby has been read in the last half-century by practitioners of widely used critical methodologies--including source-study, psychoanalytic interpretation, and Marxist analysis. He argues that in these elaborate readings of the tale, the text itself may be lost, for critics frequently seem to be more interested in their own concerns than in Melville's. Efforts to enrich Bartleby may actually impoverish it, preventing us from experiencing the sense of wonder and pain that the story provides. McCall combines close readings of Melville's tale with a lively analysis of over four decades of commentary, and he includes the complete text of story itself as an appendix, encouraging us to read the story on its own terms.

Similar books