Customer Reviews

Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival

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The reader will find reading Clare Spark's book on Melville an event to be remembered. While some in the literary establishment may balk at the conclusions those not vested in the outcome will find this book a joy to read. It is written in a manner that is enlightening to both novices and seasoned lovers of Melville. The book is sweeping in its detail, meticulous in its research and beautiful in its language.
"Hunting Captain Ahab" is of course about Melville, it is also about institutional power. This work poses a challenge to the literary establishment which they must either try to answer or ignore. Spark's extensive archival research provides us with a glimpse into the politics of literature and literary criticism. While other scholars have projected themselves or their political agendas upon Melville, Spark's Melville emerges as a fully human, complex and uncategorizable person. Melville scholarship with its varied, vested and complex agendas is also exposed. No agenda reamins unchallenged.
Eventually someone will recategorize Melville, new agendas will replace the old, but until then this moving and beautifully written work will stand as a monument to freedom of thought in the pursuit of truth. I highly recommend this book.

An essential title for Melville scholars and Melville fans, this book is not easy reading for the unscholarly (like me).
Suggestions for unscholarly readers: Keep reference books handy to look up the many "isms" discussed by the author. Make marginal notes. Read slowly. Absorb. The book is an education; it demonstrates how various propagandists have tried to pressgang Melville into their schools of thought--but he can't be neatly categorized.

This extraordinary study, as vivid with detail and passion as Moby Dick itself, is an immersion into the vigorous society of early 19th Century America. Like the novel it studies, it draws from the complex lives of real American characters. The difference is that here we have the advantage of historical analysis and hindsight, and by that difference, Moby Dick is transformed from an impenetrable verbal thicket into a seeable forest. That forest looks beyond the trees, and gives new life to the dense prose of the novel. Here we can find the origins of almost every theme that will become American writing.

This book is the typical academic drivel that is being pumped out by university presses today. It seems that modern academics haved turned literary criticism into a strange, group form of navel gazing. They have stopped focusing on the art they are purporting to critique and have instead turned their focus to critiquing each other's criticism. They appreciate only their own ramblings, not art. Moreover, the book is laden with all manner of buzzwords and code words that only an academic lost in this world of tomfoolery would understand, appreciate, or care about. A waste of time, and a waste of trees. Save your money and your mind.