new plan...


1) Introduction. Introduce the basic terms of comparison, and give an overview of the dominant historical discourse of each author's period, to suggest what they were writing against.

2) Rather than treating Absalom discretely (perhaps a summation via Forter given intro) move into Absalom and Moby-Dick together, for a comparative treatment. Suggest that we see Melville beginning to use narrative technique 'historiographically', as ideology critique, in ways that would later intensify. Treat the emergence of:
i) discontinuous/multilinear narrative as implied critique of linear progress narrative; calling attention to that which is excluded from the mainstream of historical discourse, and the complex causation or overdetermination of history by a multiplicity of structural factors (versus individual agency or unilinear development).
ii) the use of a submerged or sotto voce narrative undercurrent to suggest the repression of traumatic aspects of history, namely race and labour conflict.
iii) destabilising racial hierarchies, blurring the boundaries of race and class categories, to suggest interdependence, interpenetration, dialectical relationships. Suggest, in concluding this section, the increased pessimism seen in Pierre, as disillusionment set in, and the intensification of racialist thinking in the antebellum decades of debate over slavery.
The above work will be split over three chapters and will mainly focus on MD and Absalom, but will have reference to other Faulkner texts (especially GDM) and will look forward and back to other Melville texts where appropriate to support interpretations offered, or to show further development of an idea offered in MD.

3) Treatment of Benito Cereno in light of the preceding, exploring Melville's more intense focus on the politics of inexpressibility, on race/labour issues, in modelling the thinking of history. Suggest that, by this stage, Melville's resonance with Faulkner is highly visible - attribute this

4) Conclusion, suggesting how the Melville/Faulkner comparison suggests the persistence and pervasiveness of particular American historical problems as ideological contradictions, in that each treats similar problems in similar ways but writing at considerable geogrphical/temporal distance. Summarising my arguments about the movement in Melville's writing, having reference to his continued interest in challenging the American national success story seen in later texts (Confidence Man, Israel Potter), the haitus after CW, and his return to these questions in Billy Budd with even greater subtlety and complexity - contrasting Faulkner's development in the opposite direction (to more straightforward, direct engagement with traumas of Southern history).

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