Melville: Fashioning in Modernity - Stephen Matterson (week 2)

This meetup is hosted by Wisdom and Woe. For more details and to RSVP, please go to to: https://www.meetup.com/wisdom-and-woe/events/307250029

Melville: Fashioning in Modernity (2014) provides a radically fresh approach to Melville studies, focusing on the symbolic functions of clothing in his writing: its relationship to private and public identity, class, power, justice, authority, uniformity, transgression, civilization, and savagery.

Through close readings of both major and minor works, supplemented with historical context, Matterson elaborates on the crisis of modernity using the recurring themes of social and existential alienation, the malleability and rigidity of identity, and clothing as representative of writing itself.

Schedule:

• Week 1: Introduction - Chapter 2
• Week 2: Chapters 3 and 5

Wisdom and Woe is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."