| Popis: |
Chapter 2 argues that Melville carries his rethinking of state-of-nature philosophy into a radical experiment in literary aesthetics in Pierre; or, the Ambiguities. Rejecting the view that Pierre is a darkly cynical book, this chapter takes seriously the narrator’s claim that Pierre is “a bit too radical” for his readers' tastes. That radicalism lies not in the novel’s plot but in the sources for Melville’s figuration of democracy as a peculiar shade of green produced by corroding copper. Invoking Romantic color theory, and the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the novel pursues an experiment in radical creativity in which aesthetics and politics appear at the collision of human and nonhuman agencies. From this, the chapter proposes a new account of the role that aesthetics might play in radical democratic theory. |
