The Melville Effect
Traces of Melville are everywhere these days: in fiction, opera, performance pieces, mixed media, visual art, online mashups, even emoji translations. The Melville Effect explores this phenomenon by examining the unparalleled number of contemporary artists who are channeling Melville: either as source of inspiration, launching point, presiding muse, artistic co-conspirator, or spur for self-critique.
Asking not only why this once-forgotten yet presciently innovative creator has emerged as the nexus for such creative fervor, but why now, this book suggests that contemporary artistic experiments, especially in mixed media, enjoy an inherent connection to Melville’s aesthetics: his heady mingling of genres and borrowings from popular and high culture alike anticipate the shifting horizons of art in our own moment—a moment increasingly shaped by new forms of media, multimedia, and digital technology as well by as new conceptions of audience and authorship.
The Melville Effect is being completed under the auspices of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
Conditions of Precarity
Throughout this short story collection, various characters, young and old, of all races and backgrounds, find themselves at risk, hovering on the brink of a life-altering realization, event, or shift in the way they see the world. An immigrant grandmother who sells roses to gay customers at a West Hollywood bar; a deaf-mute masseur and sex worker plying his trade; a transient nesting in the lilac bushes of a New England college campus; a nineteenth-century orphan living on the streets of Liverpool;
a Rwandan refugee family attempting to assimilate into a Maine town; the fearful dreams besetting a youth raised by Christian fundamentalists—these are some of characters whose precarious situations are hauntingly revealed in these exquisitely crafted stories.
Forthcoming in 2023 from Black Springs Press Group.
