Subversive dialogues

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Subversive dialogues: Melville's intertextual strategies and
nineteenth-century American ideologies
Shin, Moonsu, Ph.D.
University of Hawaii, 1994
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SUBVERSIVE DIALOGUES:
MELVILLE'S INTERTEXTUAL STRATEGIES
AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN IDEOLOGIES
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN
ENGLISH
MAY 1994
By
Moonsu Shin
Dissertation Committee:
Arnold Edelstein, Chairperson
Steven Curry
PauL Lyons
Rob Wilson
David Bertelson
Copyright 1994
by
Moonsu Shin
iii
To Kilsoon Lee,
for all of her love, support, and patience,
with deepest affection and thanks
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The germinous seeds of this work were planted by
Mitchell Breitwieser, whose well-ordered and stimulating
lecture at Berkeley aroused my interest in Melville and the
American Renaissance.
Arnold Edelstein was instrumental in sprouting the
seeds into ever-growing greeness of interest and enthusiasm
years later. I was fortunate to take his graduate seminar
on Melville, which made irresistibly attractive its
subject's encyclopedic world of hybridity. He has since
been my guide in American life as well as in academic
research. lowe great debts to Rob Wilson, who was always
willing to share his brilliant ideas, sympathetic and
trenchant, and also incomparably generous with his time and
expert advice in matters intellectual and practical.
Without his constant encouragement and his faith in my
scholarly ability my life at Hawaii would have been dreary.
I am also indebted to the other members of my committee.
Special thanks are due to Paul Lyons, whose expertise in
Melville scholarship and careful reading of the manuscript
were invaluable. I am grateful to David Bertelson for his
detailed comments on both the content and style of the
dissertation. Steven Curry kindly agreed to participate in
the final oral exam and made helpful comments.
v
I would like to express my thanks to Hee-jin Park, the
advisor of my MA studies at Seoul National University, for
her unfailing concern and full confidence in my work; to
Steve Bradbury and Michael Seth for their friendship and
proofreading; to Wimal Dissanayake, John Rieder, Gary Pak,
Bevra Dang, and Helen de Leon Palmore for their kindness and
encouragement. I thank Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
and the East-West Center for their financial support.
My children, Heeryoon and Heekang, have grown up
proudly despite my long absence from home; they have
nurtured this work and me more deeply than they know. lowe
the most to my wife, Kilsoon Lee, whose support and love
made possible the completion of my graduate studies which,
at times, seemed interminable; so it is to her that this
dissertation is dedicated, with love and gratitude.
vi
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines Herman Melville's self
consciously intertextual use of antebellum popular texts to
register and critique the prevailing ideological assumptions
and values which underwrote the American exclusionary
culture of the period. Through a subversive dialogue with
his source texts which he maintains while refashioning them
into his own texts, Melville simultaneously exposes and
parodies, installs and negates, the dominant American
ideologies embedded in them. This study also focuses on
Melville's deconstructive practice in an attempt to explore
his concern with the interactions among narrative, generic
conventions, and ideology.
Consisting of five chapters and an epilogue, this
dissertation begins with a theoretical discussion of
intertextuality, ideology, and the problems of traditional
approaches to Melville's use of his sources, and then goes
on to examine four texts which prominently exemplify how
Melville uses the intertextual practice of subversive
dialogue as a central textual strategy. Chapter Two deals
with Typee in which Melville's dialogue with two American
travel narratives, David Porter's Journal of a Cruise Made
to the Pacific Ocean and Charles Stewart's A Visit to the
South Seas, textualizes his critique of the ideologies of
American expansionism and messianic nationalism. The third
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