December 4, Wednesday, 6 pm
Room 233
Plenary Opening Session
- Professor Yassen Zassoursky
RSACS
President, President of Journalism Department,
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
Welcome speech
2. Professor.Andrew Wiget
Albuquerque
University, USA
Moby-Dick: Melville
on Demons, Demagogues and Democracy
3. Professor Pavel Balditsyn
Journalism
Department,
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
The Way and the Fate of Chinese Immigrants in the USA in
Images of the Chinese-American Literature
The object
of the address is to comprehend the secret of Chinese immigrants’ success in
the USA. Immigration is often tragic, Chinese immigration at the beginning was
a double tragedy. It meant to lose their native names and relatives, their own
ancient language and culture. They were humiliated and despised in America,
depicted as aliens and “The Yellow Peril”
and forbidden the country for long sixty years. But in some decades after the
abolition of the infamous Exclusion act Asian immigrants were called “The Model Minority”.
What is the explanation of such an achievement? Chinese immigrants in the USA kept true to their traditional rules and values: “golden mean”, “to live in harmony with others”, “harmony but not sameness”, “to seek common ground while reserving differences”. One more slogan was: “The weak shall conquer”. They need to submit in circumstances of assimilation. At the same time Chinese migrants desired to become real Americans and to take principles of personal freedom and equality of all people, self-reliance and individualism, justice and democracy. Their strategy was to gain two homelands – China and America and to get twofold pride and patriotism. It was not a simple task. There were many losses and deaths, but love prevailed. Love to both countries and cultures. This way put a total overturn of traditional gender and generation roles of China, a hyphenated discourse and poetics of Chinese-American literature which use paradoxes and oxymorons, like that: “We are Americans now, we live in the tundra / Of the logical, a sea of cities, a wood of cars”.
Round Table Discussion “Bicentennial of Herman
Melville”
Coordinators
Dr. Louisa Bashmakova (Krasnodar, Russia) and
Dr. Andrew Wiget (Albuquerque, USA)
1.Andrew Wiget
Albuquerque
University, USA
Moby-Dick: Melville
on Demons, Demagogues and Democracy
Most readers who manage to finish
reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick conclude
perhaps that the essence of the story is
the obsessive hunt by a mad captain Ahab who seeks revenge on a particular
white whale who had bit off his leg. In
my experience, modern readers are either puzzled, annoyed, frustrated or
defeated by the book. They want to get on with the chase, for which they have
been made to wait 35 chapters until “The Quarterdeck” scene, when the
manic plan is revealed, after which the climactic confrontation is postponed by
another 98 chapters, which scatter among the narrative many chapters of
exposition describing the business and technical aspects of whaling, whose only
purpose seems to be to add length and not substance to the book. Such a reading reflects at best an unprepared
reader, at worst a juvenile one. It is my purpose to argue precisely for the
value of Moby-Dick as a literary
masterpiece that, while addressing the concerns of Melville’s age, also speaks directly to the
most urgent questions of our time: not
only the present war on nature, that takes many forms from climate change to
the extinction of species, but more importantly to the dangerous political
relations that make such a war possible.
Two broad historical trends must
frame any reading of Moby-Dick. First, between 1820 and 1850 the new United
States of America expanded westward
across the continent to its western shores, and thence to the furthest
reaches of the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic.
During the same period, the population multiplied three times in 30
years, much of it through a massive increase in immigration. The second was the growth of industrial
capitalism, which by the end of the century would make the United States the
most industrialized nation on earth.
These two trends sustained the rise of American imperialism, which was
driven by violence against Nature, the successful destruction which validated America’s
Manifest Destiny, in what Richard Slotkin so aptly called, “regeneration
through violence.”
The anxieties and contradictions of antebellum
America, which would eventually erupt in Civil War, were very close to
Melville, who had the early sympathies of a Jacksonian Democrat. He brought these anxieties and contradictions
aboard the ship called Pequod, aptly
named after the bloodiest seventeenth-century Puritan massacre of Indians. Any
reading of the novel which overlooks these matters and prefers to “cut to
the chase”, is both sterile and
juvenile. For Melville, the
voyage of the Pequod in Moby-Dick
is the sailing forth of the United States, burdened by the nightmares of its
past, enchanted by its vision of the future, and struggling all the while to
understand what kind of leader is required to make democracy just and humane on
the one hand and profitable on the other.
2. Alla Nikulina
Akmulla Bashkir State Pedagogical University, Ufa,
Russia
Herman Melville
as a Pioneer of the U.S.
Philosophical Novel
Although the
American mind was never inclined to abstract theorizing, the philosophical
novel as a genre appeared in the U.S. national literature at an
early stage of its development. H. Melville’s ‘Moby-Dick’ can be classified as
a philosophical novel due to its deep consideration of the reality based on
metaphysical theories, which are investigated and promoted by the author at all
levels of the artistic whole. Western and Russian literary critics made several
attempts to single out the dominant concept, connecting it to the philosophy of
Spinoza, Emerson, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and even Wittgenstein, whose
discoveries, according to K. Evans, Melville anticipated by a century. Anyway,
we cannot fail to see Melville’s desire to rely upon well-established
philosophical concepts in his investigation of the essence of the world, but we
notice, first, that the writer centers his attention on the human rather than
the universal, i.e. on practical and ethical consequences of accepting a
certain abstract worldview. Besides, realizing the limits of ready-made
concepts, Melville strives to reshape them in order to create his own original
system. Characteristically, the later development of the genre in the American
literature will be dominated by a similar approach, with the emphasis on
pragmatic values, synthesis of various philosophic traditions and individual
intellectual search.
3. Kirill Ignatov
Department of Foreign Languages and Area Studies,
Lomonosov
Moscow State University, Russia
Herman Melville
in a University Course of US
literature: From Screen to Novel
Herman Melville is one of the most popular
19th-century authors among university students in the course of US literature,
since the exciting plot of his novels does not limit the text to adventure
escapism, which imposes ‘age restrictions’ on, for example, some works of J.F.
Cooper or Mark Twain. On the contrary, Melville’s novels due to their
multi-layered nature offer opportunities for a variety of readings and a
plethora of interpretations. This is reflected in the history of adaptations of
the main works of Melville: Moby Dick,
Bartleby, Billy Bud, Benito Cereno
and others. The popularity of Melville’s works among filmmakers can be used in
teaching US
literature to encourage students to work independently with the text of the
novel. The talk presents approaches based on the principle of indirect
goal-setting, which can be used in the US Literature course to stimulate close
reading of the novel, independent extracurricular work of students, and
collective creativity. The novel ‘Moby Dick’ and its various adaptations are
used to illustrate the approaches: from Millard Webb’s silent tape Sea Beast (1926) through the classic British
version of John Huston Moby Dick
(1956) to Trey Stokes’s modernized version in the form of action movie Moby Dick (2010).
4. Louiza Bashmakova
Kuban State University, Krasnodar,
Russia
An April the
1st Showboat on Mississippi:
on H. Melville’s Genre Singularity in Confidence-Man
The object of this discourse is Melville’s deep
rootedness in genres and forms of American folk and popular culture. The
writer’s art of high comedy attracts special attention, with an accent on
analysis of Melville’s technique of burlesque, travesty, and grotesque.
Principles of comparative literature studies are suggested as the base for
analogies with the poetic ideas of Melville’s great predecessors – Cervantes,
Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe.
5. Vladislav Alekseenko
Altai State
Pedagogical University, Linguistic Institute, Barnaul, Russia
The Conceptual
System of the World in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, or The Whale
Nowadays conceptual study of images in the literary
text is important to reveal the author’s idea. In Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, or The Whale it is manifested
in the selection of concepts reflected in the writer’s work, in his individual
works and in the selection of expressive and visual means. In linguistics, the
Conceptual System of the world (CS) is understood as a reflected reality
through the prism of concepts formed on the basis of human perceptions of the
real world. A unit of the CS is a concept – the content of the concept in the
distraction from the language form of its expression, which function is to fix
and actualize the conceptual, emotional, associative, verbal, culturological
and other content of the objects of reality, included in the CS structure. The
mechanism of CS construction and the role of language in these processes were
discovered by Rolandas Pavilionis, analyzing the conceptual system of the world
from a logical and philosophical point of view. The conceptual system is
characterized by the following properties: order of introduction of concepts;
continuity of conceptual system construction; continuity of conceptual system.
The language means of CS creation are: nominal language means; grammar means of
language; figurative means; discursive means; phonosemantics of language. CS
with components included in it can be explicated in various ways: as logical
and verified tables and diagrams; frames and concepts. The analysis of Herman
Melville’s work allows us to speak about the special importance of such basic
concepts as «challenge» and «revenge» for the writer. The method of semantic
expansion allows us to identify the semantic field of the “challenge”
concept, including such units as «struggle», «test», «dare», «dispute», «face»,
«confrontation», «summon», «try», while the “revenge” concept
includes lexical representations of the concepts of «vengeance», «retribution»,
«vindictiveness», «avenge». Moby Dick is understood as something that can be
very desirable, or a goal that must be achieved: the author makes it clear that
the captain Ahab intends to pursue the whale across all seas around the world.
Other key concepts of the novel are «human obsession» and «destiny», based on the
idea of revenge and persecution of inevitable death. Besides, the entire novel
is filled with biblical imagery: the artistic form of the work and the biblical
names of the characters emphasize the philosophical concepts. Interpretable as
forms of public consciousness, they form the CS of the entire work.
6. Anna Doolina
Philological Department
Lomonosov
Moscow State University, Russia
«What my own
astonished eyes saw…»: The Unreliable Narrator in H. Melville’s Short Stories
H. Melville’s short stories bring to the fore the problem of an unreliable narrator. The narrators in the short stories are often sick. The style and rhetoric of the narrative in the short stories depend directly on the narrator’s temper, and the narrative strategy of each of the stories is determined by their “clinical records”. It forms the second level of the story – about the development of the narrator’s obsessive state. Before meeting face-to-face with the striking phenomenon, the narrators find themselves already endowed with unusual sensitivity due to their physical deterioration (the narrator of The Piazza travels to the mountains after a serious disease, the narrator of the story Cock-a-Doodle-Doo! is also sick). Then, in contact with the object described, the narrators are so strongly influenced that they are no longer able to think clearly, they are “blinded”, become obsessed with what they once saw or heard, their narrative is invaded by long intrusive series of enumerations and repetitions. For example, the formula “I prefer not to” becomes contagious in Bartleby; in Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs the narrator is exposed to the phrases of the poor. Thus, the repetitive phrases of the narrators, undergoing a semantic transformation, form the composition of Melville’s short stories and are in most cases associated with the images and theme of the disease, making the narrators of the short stories unreliable.
Round Table Discussion “Imprints: Image of America and Image of Russia”
Coordinator Professor Yassen Zassoursky (Journalism
Department, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia)
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