Look up Melville in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Melville may refer to:

Places[link]

In Australia[link]

• Melville, Western Australia - the suburb
• City of Melville, Western Australia - the local government authority
• Melville Island, Northern Territory in Australia

In Canada[link]

• Melville, Saskatchewan
• Melville, Ontario
• Melville Peninsula, Nunavut
• Melville Island, Canada, shared between Northwest Territories and Nunavut, Canada
• Lake Melville, Labrador

In New Zealand[link]

• Melville, New Zealand

In South Africa[link]

• Melville, South Africa

In the United States[link]

• Melville, Louisiana
• Melville, Montana
• Melville, New York
• Melville, Oregon
• Melville, Rhode Island
• Melville, West Virginia

Other islands[link]

• for more islands, see: Melville Island (disambiguation)

People[link]

See Melville (surname)

Things[link]

• HMS Melville, three ships of the Royal Navy
• HMAS Melville, a ship and a shore establishment of the Royal Australian Navy
• R/V Melville, oceanographic research vessel
• Melville (album), 1991 album by the Rheostatics
• Melville AFC, a former New Zealand football team, now part of Melville United

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Jean-Pierre Melville, born Jean-Pierre Grumbach (October 20, 1917 – August 2, 1973), was a French filmmaker. While with the French Resistance during World War II, he adopted the nom de guerre Melville as a tribute to his favorite American author, Herman Melville.^[1] He kept it as his stage name once the war was over.

Biography[link]

Jean-Pierre Grumbach was born in Paris, France, to an ethnic Jewish Alsatian family.

After the fall of France in 1940 during World War II, Grumbach entered the French Resistance to oppose the German Nazis who occupied the country. He adopted the nom de guerre Melville, after the American author Herman Melville, a favorite of his. Melville fought in Operation Dragoon.

When he returned from the war, he applied for a license to become an assistant director, but was refused. Without this support, he decided to direct his films by his own means, and continued to use Melville as his stage name. He became an independent film-maker and owned his own studio.

He became well known for his tragic, minimalist film noir crime dramas, such as Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle rouge (1969), starring major actors such as Alain Delon (probably the definitive 'Melvillian' actor), Jean-Paul Belmondo and Lino Ventura. Influenced by American cinema, especially gangster films of the 1930s and '40s, he used accessories such as weapons, clothes (trench coats), and fedora hats, to shape a characteristic look in his movies.

Melville's independence and 'reporting' style of film-making (he was one of the first French directors to use real locations regularly) were a major influence on the French New Wave film movement. Jean-Luc Godard used him as a minor character in his seminal New Wave film Breathless. When Godard was having difficultly editing the film, Melville suggested that he just cut directly to the best parts of a shot. Godard was inspired and the film's innovative use of jump cuts have become part of its fame.^[2]

Although a friend of left-wing icons such as Yves Montand, Melville referred to himself as "an extreme individualist" and "a right-wing anarchist" in terms of politics.^[2]

In 1963 he was invited as one of the jury at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival.^[3]

Melville died in Paris in 1973 from a heart attack at the age of 55.

Filmography[link]

As director[link]

As actor[link]

[edit] Code Name Melville

Produced in 2008, the 76-minute long feature documentary Code Name Melville (original French title: Sous le nom de Melville) reveals the importance of Jean-Pierre Melville's personal experience in the French Resistance during World War II to his approach to filmmaking.^[4][5]

References[link]

Footnotes[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Breitbart, Eric (2006). Call Me Melville. New England Review 27:3. pp. 174–183

Further reading[link]

• Ginette Vincendeau Jean-Pierre Melville - An American in Paris, 2003, BFI Publishing, ISBN 0-85170-949-4
• Tim Palmer "An Amateur of Quality: Postwar Cinema and Jean-Pierre Melville's LE SILENCE DE LA MER," Journal of Film and Video, 59:4, Fall 2006, pp. 3–19
• Tim Palmer "Jean-Pierre Melville's LE SAMOURAI", in Phil Powrie (ed.) The Cinema of France, 2006, Wallflower
• Tim Palmer "Jean-Pierre Melville and 1970s French Film Style," Studies in French Cinema, 2:3, Spring 2003

External links[link]

• Jean-Pierre Melville at the Internet Movie Database
• Bibliography of books and articles about Melville via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center
• Biography on newwavefilm.com
• Jean-Pierre Melville World Socialist Web Site
• Jean-Pierre Melville, a collection of critical assessments at the hauntological society

Herman Melville
Herman Melville, 1870
Born	(1819-08-01)August 1, 1819 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	September 28, 1891(1891-09-28) (aged 72) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, teacher, sailor, lecturer, poet, customs inspector
Nationality	American
Genres	Travelogue, Captivity narrative, Sea story, Gothic Romanticism, Allegory, Tall tale
Literary movement	Romanticism, and Skepticism; precursor to Modernism, precursor to absurdism and existentialism
Signature

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, becoming a bestseller), and after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the "Melville Revival" in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America.

Biography[link]

Early life, education, and family[link]

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819,^[1] the third of eight children of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. After her husband Allan died (& between 1832 & 1834), Maria added an "e" to the family surname — seemingly at the behest of Melville's brother Gansevoort.^[2] Part of a well-established and colorful Boston family, Melville's father spent a good deal of time abroad as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. The author's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, an honored participant of the Boston Tea Party who refused to change the style of his clothing or manners to fit the times, was depicted in Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "The Last Leaf". Herman visited him in Boston, and his father turned to him in his frequent times of financial need.

Peter Gansevoort, 1794 portrait by Gilbert Stuart

The maternal side of Melville's family was Hudson Valley Dutch. His maternal grandfather was General Peter Gansevoort, a hero of the Battle of Saratoga; in his gold-laced uniform, the general sat for a portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart, which is described in Melville's 1852 novel, Pierre, for Melville wrote out of his familial as well as his nautical background. Like the titular character in Pierre, Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent."^[3]

Allan Melvill sent his sons to the New York Male School (Columbia Preparatory School). Overextended financially and emotionally unstable, Allan tried to recover from his setbacks by moving his family to Albany in 1830 and going into the fur business. The new venture, however, was unsuccessful; the War of 1812 had ruined businesses that tried to sell overseas and he was forced to declare bankruptcy. He died soon afterward, leaving his family penniless, when Herman was 12.^[4] Although Maria had well-off kin, they were concerned with protecting their own inheritances and taking advantage of investment opportunities rather than settling their mother's estate so Maria's family would be more secure with Herman's younger brother, Thomas Melville, who eventually became a governor of Sailors Snug Harbor.

Melville attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, and again from October 1836 to March 1837, where he studied the classics.^[5]

Early working life[link]

Melville's roving disposition and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a "boy"^[6] (a green hand) on a New York ship bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, and returned on the same ship. Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) is partly based on his experiences of this journey.

Herman Melville, c. 1846-47.

The three years after Albany Academy (1837 to 1840) were mostly occupied with teaching school, except for the voyage to Liverpool in 1839. From 1838 to 1847, he resided at what is now known as the Herman Melville House in Lansingburgh, New York.^[7] Near the end of 1840 he once again decided to sign ship's articles. On January 3, 1841, he sailed from Fairhaven, Massachusetts on the whaler Acushnet,^[8] which was bound for the Pacific Ocean. He was later to comment that his life began that day. The vessel sailed around Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific. Melville left little direct information about the events of this 18-month cruise, although his whaling romance, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, probably gives many pictures of life on board the Acushnet. Melville deserted the Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands in July 1842.^[9] For three weeks he lived among the Typee natives, who were called cannibals by the two other tribal groups on the island—though they treated Melville very well. Typee, Melville's first novel, describes a brief love affair with a beautiful native girl, Fayaway, who generally "wore the garb of Eden" and came to epitomize the guileless noble savage in the popular imagination.

Melville did not seem to be concerned about repercussions from his desertion from the Acushnet. He boarded an Australian whaleship, the Lucy Ann, bound for Tahiti; took part in a mutiny and was briefly jailed in the native "Calabooza Beretanee". After release he spent several months as beachcomber and island rover (Omoo in Tahitian) eventually crossing over to Moorea. He then signed articles on yet another whaler for a six-month cruise (November 1842 − April 1843) and left that ship in Honolulu. While in Hawaii he became a controversial figure for his vehement opposition to the activities of Christian missionaries seeking to convert the native population. After working as a clerk for four months, he joined the crew of the frigate USS United States, which reached Boston in October 1844. These experiences were described in Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket, which were published as novels mainly because few believed their veracity.

Melville completed Typee in the summer of 1845, though he had difficulty getting it published.^[10] It was eventually published in 1846 in London, where it became an overnight bestseller. The Boston publisher subsequently accepted Omoo sight unseen. Typee and Omoo gave Melville overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer, and he often entertained by telling stories to his admirers. As writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper".^[10] The novels, however, did not generate enough royalties for him to live on. Omoo was not as colorful as Typee, and readers began to realize Melville was not just producing adventure stories. Redburn and White-Jacket had no problem finding publishers. Mardi was a disappointment for readers who wanted another rollicking and exotic sea yarn.

Marriage and later working life[link]

Herman Melville's home, Arrowhead, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Lemuel Shaw, on August 4, 1847; the couple honeymooned in Canada.^[11] They had four children: two sons and two daughters. In 1850 they purchased Arrowhead, a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, now a museum. Here Melville lived for 13 years, occupied with his writing and managing his farm. While living at Arrowhead, he befriended the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Lenox. Melville was tremendously inspired and encouraged by his new relationship with Hawthorne^[12] during the period that he was writing Moby-Dick (dedicating it to Hawthorne^[13]), though their friendship was on the wane only a short time later, when he wrote Pierre there. However, these works did not achieve the popular and critical success of his earlier books. Indeed, The New York Day Book on September 8, 1852, published a venomous attack on Melville and his writings headlined HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY. The item, offered as a news story, reported, "A critical friend, who read Melville's last book, 'Ambiguities," between two steamboat accidents, told us that it appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman. We were somewhat startled at the remark, but still more at learning, a few days after, that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink."^[14] Following this and other scathing reviews of Pierre by critics, publishers became wary of Melville's work. His publisher, Harper & Brothers, rejected his next manuscript, Isle of the Cross, which has been lost. On April 1, 1857, Melville published his last full-length novel, The Confidence-Man. This novel, subtitled "His Masquerade", has won general acclaim in modern times as a complex and mysterious exploration of issues of fraud and honesty, identity and masquerade, but when it was published, it received reviews ranging from the bewildered to the denunciatory.^[15]

To repair his faltering finances, Melville listened to the advice of friends and decided to enter what was for others the lucrative field of lecturing. From 1857 to 1860, he spoke at lyceums, chiefly on Roman statuary and sightseeing in Rome.^[16] Turning to poetry, he gathered a collection of verse that failed to interest a publisher. In 1863, he and his wife resettled, with their four children, in New York City. After the end of the American Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, (1866) a collection of over 70 poems that generally was ignored by the critics, though a few gave him patronizingly favorable reviews. In 1866, Melville's wife and her relatives used their influence to obtain a position for him as customs inspector for the City of New York (a humble but adequately paying appointment), and he held the post for 19 years. In a notoriously corrupt institution, Melville soon won the reputation of being the only honest employee of the customs house.^[17] But from 1866, his professional writing career can be said to have come to an end.

Later years[link]

Melville spent years writing a 16,000-line epic poem, Clarel, inspired by his earlier trip to the Holy Land. His uncle, Peter Gansevoort, by a bequest, paid for the publication of the massive epic in 1876. But the publication failed miserably, and the unsold copies were burned when Melville was unable to afford to buy them at cost.

The grave of Herman Melville and his wife

As his professional fortunes waned, Melville's marriage was unhappy. Elizabeth's relatives repeatedly urged her to leave him, and offered to have him committed as insane, but she refused. In 1867, his oldest son, Malcolm, shot himself, perhaps accidentally. While Melville worked, his wife managed to wean him off alcohol, and he no longer showed signs of agitation or insanity. But recurring depression was added to by the death of his second son, Stanwix, in San Francisco early in 1886. Melville retired in 1886, after several of his wife's relatives died and left the couple legacies that Mrs. Melville administered with skill and good fortune.

As English readers, pursuing the vogue for sea stories represented by such writers as G. A. Henty, rediscovered Melville's novels, he experienced a modest revival of popularity in England, though not in the United States. Once more he took up his pen, writing a series of poems with prose head notes inspired by his early experiences at sea. He published them in two collections, each issued in a tiny edition of 25 copies for his relatives and friends: John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891).

One of these poems further intrigued him, and he began to rework the headnote to turn it into first a short story and then a novella. He worked on it on and off for several years, but when he died in September 1891, he left the piece unfinished, and not until the literary scholar Raymond Weaver published it in 1924 did the book – which is now known as Billy Budd, Sailor – come to light.

Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate.^[18] He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. A common story says that his New York Times obituary called him "Henry Melville", implying that he was unknown and unappreciated at his time of death, but the story is not true. A later retrospective article did appear on October 6 in the same paper referring to him as "the late Hiram Melville", but this appears to have been a typesetting error.^[19]

Obituary notice in the New York Times

From about age 35, Melville ceased to be popular with a broad audience because of his increasingly philosophical, political and experimental tendencies. His novella Billy Budd, Sailor, unpublished until 33 years after the author's death, was later turned into a play, an opera by Benjamin Britten and a film by Peter Ustinov.

In Herman Melville's Religious Journey, Walter Donald Kring detailed his discovery of letters indicating that Melville had been a member of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. Until this revelation, little had been known of his religious affiliation. Hershel Parker in the second volume of his biography makes it clear that Melville became a nominal member only to placate his wife. Melville despised Unitarianism and its associated "ism", Utilitarianism. (The great English Unitarians were Utilitarians.) See the 2006 Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man for more detail on Melville and religion than in Parker's 2002 volume.

Publications and contemporary reactions[link]

Title page of the first U.S. edition of Moby-Dick, 1851

Most of Melville's novels were published first in the United Kingdom and then in the U.S. Sometimes the editions contain substantial differences with Melville acceding to his different publishers' requirements for different audiences.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale has become Melville's most famous work and is often considered one of the greatest literary works of all time. It was dedicated to Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.^[13] It did not, however, make Melville rich. The book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher, Harper & Brothers. Melville also wrote Billy Budd, White-Jacket, Israel Potter, Redburn, Typee, Omoo, Pierre, The Confidence-Man and many short stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" and "Benito Cereno," and works of various genres.

Melville is less well known as a poet and did not publish poetry until later in life. After the Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, which did not sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later.^[20] Again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic length verse-narrative Clarel, about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite obscure, even in his own time. Among the longest single poems in American literature, Clarel, published in 1876, had an initial printing of only 350 copies. The critic Lewis Mumford found a copy of the poem in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut"—in other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years.^[21]

His poetry is not as highly critically esteemed as his fiction, although some critics place him as the first modernist poet in the United States; others would assert that his work more strongly suggest what today would be a postmodern view.^[22] A leading champion of Melville's claims as a great American poet was the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, who issued a selection of Melville's poetry prefaced by an admiring and acute critical essay. According to Melville scholar Elizabeth Renker "a sea change in the reception of the poems is incipient."^[23] In reference to the poem Clarel, poetry critic Helen Vendler remarked: "What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame'".^[24]

Critical response[link]

Contemporary criticism[link]

Melville was not financially successful as a writer, having earned just over $10,000 for his writing during his lifetime.^[25] After the success of travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas and stories based on misadventures in the merchant marine and navy, Melville's popularity declined dramatically. By 1876, all of his books were out of print.^[26] In the later years of his life and during the years after his death he was recognized, if at all, as only a minor figure in American literature.

Melville revival[link]

A confluence of publishing events in the 1920s brought about a reassessment now commonly called "the Melville Revival". The two books generally considered most important to the Revival were Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic and his 1924 edition of Melville's last great but never quite finished manuscript, Billy Budd, which Melville's granddaughter gave to Weaver when he visited her for research on the biography. The other works that helped fan the Revival flames were Carl Van Doren's The American Novel (1921), D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Carl Van Vechten's essay in The Double Dealer (1922), and Lewis Mumford's biography, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision (1929).^[27] In 1945, the Melville Society was formed as a nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating Melville’s literary legacy.^[28] Jay Leyda, better known for his work in film, spent more than a decade gathering documents and records for the day by day Melville Log (1951). In the same year Newton Arvin published the critical biography Herman Melville, which won the nonfiction National Book Award.

In the 1960s, Northwestern University Press, in alliance with the Newberry Library and the Modern Language Association, established ongoing publication runs of Melville's various titles.^[29] This alliance sought to create a "definitive" edition of Melville's works. Titles republished under the Northwestern-Newberry Library include Typee, Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, Omoo, Israel Potter, Pierre or the Ambiguities, Confidence-Man, White Jacket or the World in a Man-of-War, Moby Dick, Mardi and a Voyage Thither, Redburn, Clarel, as well as several volumes of Melville's poems, journals, and correspondence.

Themes of gender and sexuality[link]

Herman Melville, 1860

Although not the primary focus of Melville scholarship, there has been an emerging interest in the role of gender and sexuality in some of Melville's writings.^[30][31][32] Some critics, particularly those interested in gender studies, have explored the existence of male-dominant social structures in Melville's fiction.^[33] For example, Alvin Sandberg claimed that the short story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" offers "an exploration of impotency, a portrayal of a man retreating to an all-male childhood to avoid confrontation with sexual manhood" from which the narrator engages in "congenial" digressions in heterogeneity.^[34] In line with this view Warren Rosenberg argues the homosocial "Paradise of Bachelors" is shown to be "superficial and sterile."^[32] David Harley Serlin observes in the second half of Melville's diptych, "The Tartarus of Maids," the narrator gives voice to the oppressed women he observes: "As other scholars have noted, the "slave" image here has two clear connotations. One describes the exploitation of the women's physical labor, and the other describes the exploitation of the women's reproductive organs. Of course, as models of women's oppression, the two are clearly intertwined."^[35] In the end the narrator is never fully able to come to terms with the contrasting masculine and feminine modalities. Issues of sexuality have been observed in other works as well. Rosenberg notes Taji, in "Mardi", and the protagonist in "Pierre" "think they are saving young "maidens in distress" (Yillah and Isabel) out of the purest of reasons but both are also conscious of a lurking sexual motive."^[32] When Taji kills the old priest holding Yillah captive, he states "remorse smote me hard; and like lightning I asked myself whether the death deed I had done was sprung of virtuous motive, the rescuing of a captive from thrall, or whether beneath the pretense I had engaged in this fatal affray for some other selfish purpose, the companionship of a beautiful maid."^[36] In "Pierre" the motive for his self-sacrifice for Isabel is admitted: "womanly beauty and not womanly ugliness invited him to champion the right."^[37] Rosenberg argues "This awareness of a double motive haunts both books and ultimately destroys their protagonists who would not fully acknowledge the dark underside of their idealism. The epistemological quest and the transcendental quest for love and belief are consequently sullied by the erotic."^[32]

Melville fully explores the theme of sexuality in his major poetical work "Clarel." When the narrator is separated from Ruth, with whom he has fallen in love, he is free to explore other sexual (and religious) possibilities before deciding at the end of the poem to participate in the ritualistic order marriage represents. In the course of the poem "he considers every form of sexual orientation - celibacy, homosexuality, hedonism, and heterosexuality - raising the same kinds of questions as when he considers Islam or Democracy."^[32]

Some passages and sections of Melville's works demonstrate his willingness to address all forms of sexuality, including the homoerotic, in his works. Commonly given examples from Moby Dick are the interpretation of male bonding from what is termed the "marriage bed" episode involving Ishmael and Queequeg, and the "Squeeze of the Hand" chapter describing the camaraderie of sailors extracting spermaceti from a dead whale.^[38] Billy Budd's physical attractiveness is described in quasi-feminine terms: "As the Handsome Sailor, Billy Budd's position aboard the seventy-four was something analogous to that of a rustic beauty transplanted from the provinces and brought into competition with the highborn dames of the court." Some critics argue that "Ahab's pursuit of the whale, which they suggest can be associated with the feminine in its shape, mystery, and in its naturalness, represents the ultimate fusion of the epistemological and sexual quest."^[32]

Law and literature[link]

In recent years, Billy Budd has become a central text in the field of legal scholarship known as law and literature. In the novel, Billy, a handsome and popular young sailor impressed from the merchant vessel Rights of Man to serve aboard H.M.S. Bellipotent in the late 1790s, during the war between Revolutionary France and Great Britain and her monarchic allies, excites the enmity and hatred of the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart. Claggart devises phony charges of mutiny and other crimes to level against Billy, and Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere institutes an informal inquiry, at which Billy convulsively strikes Claggart because his stammer prevents him from speaking. Vere immediately convenes a drumhead court-martial, at which, after serving as sole witness and as Billy's de facto counsel, Vere then urges the court to convict and sentence Billy to death. The trial is recounted in chapter 21, the longest chapter in the book, and that trial has become the focus of scholarly controversy: was Captain Vere a good man trapped by bad law, or did he deliberately distort and misrepresent the applicable law to condemn Billy to death? ^[39]

Legacy[link]

Plaque outside 104 East 26th street, New York

On May 12, 1985, the New York City Herman Melville Society gathered at 104 East 26th Street to dedicate the intersection of Park Avenue south and 26th Street as Herman Melville Square. This is the street where Melville lived from 1863 to 1891 and where, among other works, he wrote Billy Budd.^[40]

In 2010 it was announced that a new species of extinct giant sperm whale, Livyatan melvillei was named in honor of Melville. The paleontologists who discovered the fossil are all fans of Moby-Dick and wanted to dedicate their discovery to Melville.^[41][42]

Selected Bibliography[link]

• Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)
• Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
• Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849)
• Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)
• White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850)
• Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
• Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)
• "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853) (short story)
• "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" (1854) (novella, possibly incorporating a short rewrite of the lost Isle of the Cross^[43])
• "Benito Cereno" (1855)
• Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855)
• The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)
• Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) (poetry collection)
• Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) (epic poem)
• John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) (poetry collection)
• Timoleon (1891) (poetry collection)
• Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (unfinished, 1891) [Published Posthumously] (1924)

References and further reading[link]

• Adler, Joyce (1981). War in Melville's Imagination. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-0575-8. 
• Arvin, Newton (2002). Herman Melville. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3871-3. 
• Bryant, John (1986). A Companion to Melville Studies. Westport: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23874-X. 
• Bryant, John (1993). Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507782-2. 
• Chamberlain, Ray (1985). Monsieur Melville. City: Coach House Pr. ISBN 0-88910-239-2. 
• Delbanco, Andrew (2005). Melville, His World and Work. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40314-0. 
• Edinger, Edward (1985). Melville's Moby Dick: An American Nekyia (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts). New Haven: Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-70-0. 
• Garner, Stanton (1993). The Civil War World of Herman Melville. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-0602-5. 
• Goldner, Loren (2006). Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man. Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer. Cambridge: Queequeg Publications. ISBN 0-9700308-2-7. 
• Gretchko, John M. J. (1990). Melvillean Ambiguities. Cleveland: Falk & Bright. 
• Hardwick, Elizabeth (2000). Herman Melville. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-89158-4. 
• Hayford, Harrison (2003). Melville's Prisoners. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-1973-0. 
• Johnson, Bradley A. (2011). The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville: Aesthetics, Politics, Duplicity. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-61097-341-0. 
• Levine, Robert (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55571-X. 
• Martin, Robert (1986). Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1672-8. 
• Miller, Perry (1956). The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville. New York: Harvest Book. 
• Parker, Hershel (1996). Herman Melville: A Biography. Volume I, 1819–1851. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-5428-8. 
• Parker, Hershel (2005). Herman Melville: A Biography. Volume II, 1851–1891. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-8186-2. 
• Renker, Elizabeth (1998). Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-5875-5. 
• Robertson-Lorant, Laurie (1996). Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers. ISBN 0-517-59314-9. 
• Rogin, Michael (1983). Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-50609-X. 
• Rosenberg, Warren (1984). "'Deeper than Sappho': Melville, Poetry, and the Erotic". Modern Language Studies 14 (1). 
• Spark, Clare L. (2001). Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (rev.ed. paperback 2006 ed.). Kent: Kent State University Press. ISBN 0-87338-888-7. 
• Sullivan, Wilson (1972). New England Men of Letters.. New York: Atheneum. ISBN 0-02-788680-8. 
• Szendy, Peter (2009). Prophecies of Leviathan. Reading Past Melville.. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 978-0-8232-3154-6. 
• Weisberg, Richard (1984). The Failure of the Word: The Lawyer as Protagonist in Modern Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-04592-1. 

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Find more about Herman Melville on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

• Arrowhead—The Home of Herman Melville
• Physical description of Melville from his 1856 passport application
• Melville's page at Literary Journal.com-research articles on Melville's works
• Melville Room at the Berkshire Athenaeum
• New Bedford Whaling Museum
• The Confidence Man: His Masquerade ed. Scott Atkins with critical introduction, historical contexts, and new footnotes from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
• Billy Budd: Foretopman ed. David Padilla with extensive linked footnotes and glossary of terms from American Studies at the University of Virginia
• The Language of Gesture: Melville's Imaging of Blackness and the Modernity of Billy Budd by Klaus Benesch
• The Encantadas from American Studies at the University of Virginia
• The Life and Works of Herman Melville
• The Melville Society
• Works by Herman Melville at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Herman Melville in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Melville index entry at Poets' Corner
• Contemporary views on Herman Melville
• "Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World", PBS, American Experience, 2010. Cf. section on Melville.
• Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America: Collecting Herman Melville

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (April 2011)

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus

Dreyfus 2011
Born	(1929-10-15) October 15, 1929 (age 82)
Era	20th/21st century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Phenomenology
Main interests	Phenomenology, Existentialism, Psychology of Literature and Psychology
Notable ideas	Dreyfus' critique of artificial intelligence
Influenced by Martin Heidegger · Maurice Merleau-Ponty · Ludwig Wittgenstein · Samuel Todes · Søren Kierkegaard · Friedrich Nietzsche · Homer · Michel Foucault · Herman Melville · Dostoyevsky · Dante · Aristotle · Walter Jackson Freeman III
Influenced Philosophy of artificial intelligence, John Searle, Richard Rorty, Alva Noë, Mark Wrathall, Sean D. Kelly, Charles Taylor, John Haugeland, Tim van Gelder, Tao Ruspoli

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (born October 15, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

His main interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. Dreyfus is known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger.

Background[link]

Born in Terre Haute, Indiana to Stanley S. and Irene Lederer Dreyfus, Dreyfus was educated at Harvard University, earning three degrees there, with a BA in 1951, an MA in 1952, and a PhD in 1964, under the supervision of Dagfinn Føllesdal. He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger. His Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division 1, is thought by many who have attempted to teach Heidegger to undergraduates to be the authoritative text on Heidegger's most significant contribution to philosophy. He also co-authored Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, translated Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense, and authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't Do. While spending most of his teaching career at Berkeley, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at Brandeis University (1957 to 1959), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1960 to 1968), the University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. His philosophical work has influenced Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, John Searle, and his former student John Haugeland, among others. His critical comments on the existential phenomenology and subsequent dialectical philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre may well have played a significant role in the demise of Sartre's influence on recent thought.

In 1965, while teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dreyfus published "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence", an attack on the work of Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, two of the leading researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Dreyfus not only questioned the results they had so far obtained, but he also criticized their basic presupposition (that intelligence consists of the manipulation of physical symbols according to formal rules), and argued that the AI research program was doomed to failure. In 1965, he spent time at the Rand Corporation, while work on artificial intelligence was in progress there.

In addition to criticizing artificial intelligence, Dreyfus is well known for making the work of continental philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault, intelligible to analytically trained philosophers.

His younger brother, Stuart Dreyfus, earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dreyfus's criticism of AI[link]

Dreyfus's critique of artificial intelligence (AI) concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions he criticizes are what he calls the "biological" and "psychological" assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain is analogous to computer hardware and the mind is analogous to computer software. The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations (in the form of algorithmic rules) on discrete representations or symbols.

Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalised (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that intelligence is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality.

On the basis of these two assumptions, workers in the field claim that cognition is the manipulation of internal symbols by internal rules, and that, therefore, human behaviour is, to a large extent, context free (see contextualism). Therefore a truly scientific psychology is possible, which will detail the 'internal' rules of the human mind, in the same way the laws of physics detail the 'external' laws of the physical world. But it is this key assumption that Dreyfus denies. In other words, he argues that we cannot now (and never will) be able to understand our own behavior in the same way as we understand objects in, for example, physics or chemistry: that is, by considering ourselves as things whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. According to Dreyfus, a context free psychology is a contradiction in terms.

Dreyfus's arguments against this position are taken from the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition (especially the work of Martin Heidegger). Heidegger argued that, contrary to the cognitivist views on which AI is based, our being is in fact highly context bound, which is why the two context-free assumptions are false. Dreyfus doesn't deny that we can choose to see human (or any) activity as being 'law governed', in the same way that we can choose to see reality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts ... if we wish. But it is a huge leap from that to state that because we want to or can see things in this way that it is therefore an objective fact that they are the case. In fact, Dreyfus argues that they are not (necessarily) the case, and that, therefore, any research program that assumes they are will quickly run into profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore the current efforts of workers in the field are doomed to failure.

Given that Dreyfus has a reputation as a Luddite in some quarters, it's important to emphasise that he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible; only that the current research program is fatally flawed. Instead he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. (This view is shared by psychologists in the embodied psychology (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and distributed cognition traditions. His opinions are similar to those of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks as well as researchers in the field of artificial life.)

Daniel Crevier writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier."^[1]

Webcasting Philosophy[link]

When UC Berkeley and Apple began making a selected number of lecture classes freely available to the public as podcasts beginning around 2006, a recording of Dreyfus teaching a course called "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature - From Gods to God and Back" rose to 58th most popular webcast on iTunes.[3] These webcasts have attracted the attention of many, including non-academics, to Dreyfus and his subject area.^[2]

Achievements[link]

Dreyfus was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.^[3] Erasmus University awarded Dreyfus an honorary doctorate "for his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence, and for his equally outstanding contributions to the analysis and interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy".^[4]

Dreyfus is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World.^[5]

Bibliography[link]

• 1965. "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence". Rand Paper. [4]
• 1972. What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. ISBN 00600110821
• 1979. What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. (revised) ISBN 0-06-090613-8, ISBN 0-06-090624-3.
• 1983. (with Paul Rabinow) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-16312-3
• 1986 (with Stuart Dreyfus). Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer. New York: Free Press.
• 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-54056-8, ISBN 978-0-262-54056-8
• 1992. What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-54067-3
• 2000. Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert Dreyfus, Volume 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-73127-4.
• 2000. Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-202-73128-2
• 2002. On the Internet Revised Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-77516-8
• 2011. (with Sean Dorrance Kelly) All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.

See also[link]

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References[link]

Notes

• Crevier, Daniel (1993), AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence, New York, NY: BasicBooks, ISBN 0-465-02997-3 
• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.

External links[link]

• Professor Bert Dreyfus at the Berkeley Philosophy Department Web page
• Professor Bert Dreyfus's UC Berkeley Home Page
• Professor Bert Dreyfus' online papers at UC Berkeley in archive.org, with links to old Berkeley web page
• Webcast: Man, God, and Society in Western Literature
• Webcast: Existentialism in Literature and Film
• Webcast: Heidegger
• Copy of Article "The iPod Lecture Circuit" by Michelle Quinn in LA Times, November 2007
• Conversations with History, an interview, November 2005
• Comprehensive interview
• AfterTV: Conversations about media,culture and technology, Interview between Andrew Keen and Hubert Dreyfus February 16, 2006
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk

Tory Burch
Burch in India
Born	(1966-06-17) June 17, 1966 (age 46) Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, United States
Residence	New York, New York
Nationality	American
Education	University of Pennsylvania
Occupation	Fashion designer
Known for	Bohemian chic accessories
Awards	2005 Rising Star, Fashion Group International; 2007 brand launch award, Accessories Council of Excellence; CFDA Accessories Designer of the Year, 2008
Labels	Tory Burch

Tory Burch (born June 17, 1966; née Robinson) is an American fashion designer, business woman and philanthropist who was born, raised and educated in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

She attended the Agnes Irwin School in Rosemont, PA, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member of the sorority Kappa Alpha Theta. After graduation, she moved to New York City, where she began a career working with fashion designers, including Zoran, a Yugoslavian designer.^[1] She worked at Harper's Bazaar magazine.^[1][2] She was a copywriter for Polo Ralph Lauren and worked for Vera Wang.

She began a fashion label in February 2004. The label was an immediate success and was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey the following year. The label has stores in several large American cities and has lines that are sold in several upscale specialty department stores. Burch has won several fashion awards for her designs. The company has since grown to 36 stores, four of which are outlet stores in Woodbury Commons, NY; San Marcos, TX; Camarillo, CA; and Orlando, FL Premium Outlets. Her fashion label known as "TRB by Tory Burch"—later as "Tory Burch"—began as a business operation in her Upper East Side apartment and quickly blossomed into free-standing boutiques,^[3] now numbering 68.^[4] In February 2004, Tory Burch opened a flagship store in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.^[5][6] The store was almost completely sold out on the first day.^[6] Stories about her and her fashion line have been in a broad spectrum of magazines and newspapers,^[7] and in April 2005, Winfrey endorsed her line on The Oprah Winfrey Show.^[3]