December 4, Wednesday, 6 pm  Room 233

Plenary Opening Session

1. 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)

Continue reading →