Meredith Farmer is assistant teaching professor in English and the Environmental Program at Wake Forest University. She is author of the forthcoming book Melville’s Leaks: Science, Materialism, and the Reconstitution of Persons.

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is visiting assistant professor of American studies at Brandeis University.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn

Meredith Farmer

Part I. Ontologies

1. Sailing without Ahab

Steve Mentz

2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with Whales

Branka Arsi¿

3. Ahab after Agency

Mark D. Noble

4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New Materialism

Christian P. Haines

Part II. Relations

5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch Synesthesia

Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese

6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain

Michael D. Snediker

7.‘The King is a Thing’; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist Reading

Russell Sbriglia

8. Approaching Ahab Blind

Christopher Castiglia

Part III. Politics

9. ‘this post-mortemizing of the whale’: The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old

Bonnie Honig

[...]’s Electromagnetic Constitution

Donald E. Pease

11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder

12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of Reason

Jonathan Lamb

Part IV. New Melvilles

13. Ahab’s After-Life: The Tortoises of ‘The Encantadas’

Matthew A. Taylor

14. Israel Potter; or, the Excrescence

Colin Dayan

15.Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and Labor

Ivy Wilson

16. Melville’s Basement Tapes

John Modern

Afterword: Melville Among the Materialists

Samuel Otter

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index