Beyond the Walls. Being with Each Other in Herman Melville's Clarel, de Laura Lopéz Peña

Herman Melville's works constitute spaces to analyze the etnico-political potentiality of intersubjectivity for the creation of forms of togetherness that radically question traditional, dividing, categorization of both personal and communitarian identity such as race, nation and nationality, religion, social class, gender, sexuality, even age. Published in 1876, as the United States celebrated its Centennial, and adopting a Holy Land context that resonates with a postbellum America of violent hatreds and divisions, Melville's complex narrative poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land is an important work to unfold the politics in Melville's oeuvre. This book argues that Clarel is an universalist poem claiming the necessity of intersubjectivity for the creation of plural thinking and more democratic human relationships. At the same time it exposes the egocentrisms and one-sided wordviews hindering this development. Melville's articulation of intersubjective universalism underlines the impossibility of monolithic 'Truth', as it points to the partiality of any interpretation, as well as to the narrowness, authoritarianism, and (self-) destructive consequences of clinging to one-sided conceptions of meaning. 

Prologue by Timothy Marr   13

INTRODUCTION   19

CHAPTER 1

Intersubjective Universalism: A Theoretical Articulation   29

CHAPTER 2

Intersubjectivity and Universalism in Herman Melville's Oeuvre   55

CHAPTER 3

Writing Clarel   73

CHAPTER 4

The Politics of Clarel: "Without the Walls"   115

CHAPTER 5

Clarel: Poem and Pilgrimage   125

CHAPTER 6

Resonant Contexts: The Holy Land and the United States   159

CHAPTER 7

"Separate thyself from me": Inter-community Walls   205

CHAPTER 8

Aborted Potentialities: Inter-personal Walls   219

CONCLUSIONS   283

BIBLIOGRAPHY   293