批評家メルヴィル : "Hawthorne and his Mosses"における国家と文学
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概要
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This essay explores the diverse aspects of literary nationalism inHerman Melville's renowned essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850).Whereas Melville champions the American writers and anticipates theemergence of “American literature,” -which means that he persistsin the particular rather than the universal— he himself writes this essayanonymously and pretends as if he were “a Virginian Spending July inVermont.” This auctorial strategy can be explained by the theory proposedby Benedict Anderson in his monumental work Imagined Communities(1991). According to Anderson, what differentiates the medieval era fromthe modern time is its sense of time. As the religious communities ofmedieval mind decline, the simultaneous sense of time has come to takeplace where a person can share the same sense of time with a total strangerliving far away. Anderson concludes that this “idea of ‘homogeneous, emptytime’,” to borrow from Benjamin, enabled to form the idea of nationalism.Then Melville, by disguising himself in the essay as a Southerner who hasnever seen Hawthorne, can be said to be reinforcing the idea of nationalismbecause of his anonymity.Another significant aspect of Melville’s essay is that he compares the“excellent books” to “foundlings.” Here, he seems to be suggesting thatthe authority of a literary work should be carefully denied. This contradictswith the idea of “possessive individualism” proposed precedently by WaiChee Dimock. However, by referring to the arguments of Ellen Weinauer,where she uncovers the new idea of “literary brotherhood” implied inMelville’s works, we conclude that the disappearance of the author’s namein Melville’s essay not only makes it possible to establish the idea of literarynationalism, but also suggests an alternative way of possessing art.
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