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CFP: MELVILLE’S ORIGINS (UPDATED)
New York University, New York, NY
June 17-20, 2019
Deadline for proposals: October 1, 2018
The Twelfth International Melville Society Conference will take place at New
York University to celebrate the bicentennial of Herman Melville's birth
in lower Manhattan in 1819. The conference will commemorate Melville's
life, work, and legacies through a series of papers and conversations
devoted to the theme of “origins” broadly conceived. We invite proposals
for individual papers or panels organized around MELVILLE’S ORIGINS
as it relates to historicist, theoretical, textual, biographical, and pedagogical
approaches to Melville’s writings and to the history of their reception in
criticism, adaptation, the digital world, popular culture, and the fine arts.
We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers will be Rodrigo
Lazo, Professor of English at UC-Irvine, and Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer
in Literature at MIT. In addition to the regular panels and roundtables at
NYU, there will be a number of special events and Melville-related
excursions around New York City. We are also planning an optional post-
conference daytrip to Mystic, CT, to tour the historic seaport and see
the 1841 whaleship, Charles W. Morgan, on Friday, June 21.
For those traveling to New York City, we are working to procure reasonably
priced suites in a residence hall on campus. More details will be available
at our conference website, ![]()
www.melville2019.weebly.com, scheduled to
go live the last week of September.
Please submit proposals by October 1, 2018 to melvillenyc@gmail.com,
Paper proposals should not exceed 300 words, and panel proposals should
not exceed 1000 words. In addition to submissions for traditional panels and
individual papers, proposals for roundtables, workshops, and sessions
using new presentation formats are particularly welcome.
Proposals for anything involving more than one person should indicate the
names of all participants and the nature of their contributions. In the subject
line please use the format [“proposal type, surname,” e.g. “Paper, Smith”]
and name the file using the format [“surname, first name,” e.g. “Smith,
John”].
We welcome proposals from independent scholars, creative artists, and
academic scholars of diverse institutional affiliation, academic rank, and
disciplinary background. We can accept two proposals from an individual
so long as they involve two different roles (e.g. paper presenter as well as
panel chair or roundtable discussant).
* Papers might focus on Melville’s works in relation to the terms "origins"
and "original" as they were understood in various nineteenth-century
discourses: for example, political and ethnological debates about national
origins, racial lineage, or indigeneity; philosophical formulations of an
essential or “aboriginal” self (to use Emerson’s phrase); scientific theories
about the genesis of the cosmos, life-forms, and new species; proto-
anthropological conversations about human origins, the origins of language,
and the role of animals as intercessors between humankind and a primeval
past; theological debates over “original sin” and human depravity; proto-
psychological theories about the roots of morality, sexual desire, mental
faculties, and personality traits.
* “Originality” is also a hallmark of the Romantic artist, and papers might
explore Melville’s attitudes regarding this aesthetic. What do we make of
Melville’s claim that “it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in
imitation,” especially in light of his own penchant for borrowing from other
writers? Papers might explore Melville’s views of intellectual property and
the publishing industry, his thinking about “original characters” in fiction, or
his varied responses to Evert Duyckinck and Young America’s call for an
original American literature. Likewise, papers might examine the
importance assigned to artistic originality in popular and scholarly
assessments of Melville’s writing.
* We also encourage papers that deploy “origins” as a key term for current theoretical approaches to Melville’s works. As a designation of both
temporal and spatial starting points, the concept of origins might help us
think about the commencement of narrative (“Call me Ishmael”) or the
commencement of movement within an imagined geography−both of which
might also be visualized through digital mapping. Scholars engaged in
textual historiography, history of the book, or manuscript editing might discuss
the problems of discerning an original text from the multiple versions and
editions of Melville's works as well as explore the possibilities of using digital technology to present textual variants.
* We hope papers will use this anniversary to reflect on the 19th-century
response to Melville’s works and on the origins and development of Melville
Studies since its inception a century ago, to assess the current state of the
field, and to think speculatively about new directions for scholarship and
teaching. What new insights might be gleaned from revisiting Melville's
origins in New York City−a beacon for global migration and a center of arts
and letters− as well as the myriad materials from which he derived ideas
and inspiration?
* Scholarship has often worked in tandem with creative responses to Melville
by artists of various media, and accordingly, we also invite papers that think
about the role of Melville-inspired contemporary art in opening new avenues
of interpretation. How do such artistic appropriations suggest the relationship
of an adaptation to its original, and how are Melville’s works transformed
by such borrowings, filmic, fictional, artistic, and otherwise?
