American literature | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 63 pages of analysis & critique of American literature.

American literature | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 63 pages of analysis & critique of American literature.
This section contains 16,596 words
(approx. 56 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Pamela A. Boker

SOURCE: “‘Circle-Sailing’: The Eternal Return of Tabooed Grief in Melville's Moby-Dick” in The Grief Taboo in American Literature: Loss and Prolonged Adolescence in Twain, Melville, and Hemingway, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 38-67.

In the excerpt below, Boker presents a psychoanalytic reading of Melville's motivation in Moby-Dick. She suggests that Melville felt abandoned by his mother and that his art was nourished by “repression, disavowal, and displacement of grief.”

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

—Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation...

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This section contains 16,596 words
(approx. 56 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Pamela A. Boker
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Critical Essay by Pamela A. Boker from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.