Jennifer Greiman – författare

For Herman Melville, the instability of democracy held tremendous creative potential. Examining the centrality of political thought to Melville's oeuvre, Jennifer Greiman argues that Melville's densely figurative aesthetics give form to a radical reimagining of democratic foundations, relations, and ways of being—modeling how we can think democracy in political theory today.Across Melville's five decades of writing, from his early Pacific novels to his late poetry, Greiman identifies a literary formalism that is radically political and carries the project of democratic theory in new directions. Recovering Melville's readings in political philosophy and aesthetics, Greiman shows how he engaged with key problems in political theory—the paradox of foundations, the vicious circles of sovereign power, the fragility of the people—to produce a body of radical democratic art and thought. Scenes of green and growing life, circular structures, and images of a groundless world emerge as forms for understanding democracy as a collective project in flux. In Melville's experimental aesthetics, Greiman finds a significant precursor to the tradition of radical democratic theory in the US and France that emphasizes transience and creativity over the foundations and forms prized by liberalism. Such politics, she argues, are necessarily aesthetic: attuned to material and sensible distinctions, open to new forces of creativity.

Now more than a century since the revival that placed Herman Melville at the center of the US literary canon, his work stands as one of the most important touchstones of world literature. The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville aims to reintroduce readers to a writer whom they think they know well by re-examining Melville's entire corpus--the novels, short prose, and poetry--in light of the diversity and vibrancy of global Melville studies. Bringing together the most innovative work of international scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville offers a comprehensive survey of both Melville's writing and the new approaches it continues to introduce into literary studies. By engaging urgent discourses such as those around indigeneity and race, ecology and energy, gender and sexuality studies, and reimagining well-developed critical approaches to questions of literary history, politics, war, economics, aesthetics, and philosophy in Melville's work, this Handbook seeks to push the study of Melville's work into its second century. Attending to Melville's origins--biographical and textual, intellectual and aesthetic, historical and political--the Handbook also examines Melville's currency and contemporaneity, the ways that his writing continues to generate new thought and new art. This volume, in short, endeavors to present a new critical Melville for new critical times.

Now more than a century since the revival that placed Herman Melville at the center of the US literary canon, his work stands as one of the most important touchstones of world literature. The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville aims to reintroduce readers to a writer whom they think they know well by re-examining Melville's entire corpus--the novels, short prose, and poetry--in light of the diversity and vibrancy of global Melville studies. Bringing together the most innovative work of international scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville offers a comprehensive survey of both Melville's writing and the new approaches it continues to introduce into literary studies. By engaging urgent discourses such as those around indigeneity and race, ecology and energy, gender and sexuality studies, and reimagining well-developed critical approaches to questions of literary history, politics, war, economics, aesthetics, and philosophy in Melville's work, this Handbook seeks to push the study of Melville's work into its second century. Attending to Melville's origins--biographical and textual, intellectual and aesthetic, historical and political--the Handbook also examines Melville's currency and contemporaneity, the ways that his writing continues to generate new thought and new art. This volume, in short, endeavors to present a new critical Melville for new critical times.

Now more than a century since the revival that placed Herman Melville at the center of the US literary canon, his work stands as one of the most important touchstones of world literature. The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville aims to reintroduce readers to a writer whom they think they know well by re-examining Melville's entire corpus--the novels, short prose, and poetry--in light of the diversity and vibrancy of global Melville studies. Bringing together the most innovative work of international scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville offers a comprehensive survey of both Melville's writing and the new approaches it continues to introduce into literary studies. By engaging urgent discourses such as those around indigeneity and race, ecology and energy, gender and sexuality studies, and reimagining well-developed critical approaches to questions of literary history, politics, war, economics, aesthetics, and philosophy in Melville's work, this Handbook seeks to push the study of Melville's work into its second century. Attending to Melville's origins--biographical and textual, intellectual and aesthetic, historical and political--the Handbook also examines Melville's currency and contemporaneity, the ways that his writing continues to generate new thought and new art. This volume, in short, endeavors to present a new critical Melville for new critical times.

"What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?" Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy to sovereign power that continues to occupy political theory today. Is sovereignty, with its reliance on singular and exceptional power, fundamentally inimical to democracy? Or might a more fully realized democracy distribute, share, and popularize sovereignty, thus blunting its exceptional character and its basic violence? In Democracy's Spectacle, Jennifer Greiman looks to an earlier moment in the history of American democracy's vexed interpretation of sovereignty to argue that such questions about the popularization of sovereign power shaped debates about political belonging and public life in the antebellum United States. In an emergent democracy that was also an expansionist slave society, Greiman argues, the problems that sovereignty posed were less concerned with a singular and exceptional power lodged in the state than with a power over life and death that involved all Americans intimately.Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the sovereignty of the people in Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Greiman tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere. Greiman brings together literature and political theory, as well as materials on antebellum performance culture, antislavery activism, and penitentiary reform, to argue that the antebellum public sphere, transformed by its empowerment, emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment.

Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.

Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.

Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.

Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.