"Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville's emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. It makes a case for the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville's work"--

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

10.Ahab’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