Ishmael: A Study of the Symbolic Mode In Primitivism - James Baird (week 2)

In Ishmael: A Study of the Symbolic Mode In Primitivism (1958), Professor James Baird describes the genesis of a new system of art, beginning around 1850, that he terms "authentic primitivism." He examines writers who helped craft the modern authentic primitivism movement, with emphasis on one central figure, Herman Melville.

According to Baird, the aesthetic austerity of Protestantism and the increasing secularization of Western civilization undermined the cultural authority of symbols created by Catholicism. "Primary art" emerged to supplant Christian symbolism, taking on a quasi-religious role by connecting humans to a transcendent being.

Ron Harvey Pearce calls Ishmael "a study of the nature and destiny of the modern religious sensibility.... Its end is to demonstrate how imaginative writers, sensing the religious crisis in their (and our) culture, have turned to Polynesia and the Orient for a body of symbols which would serve to reintegrate the modern psyche and to give force and direction to its search for spiritual wholeness."

Dorothee Finkelstein writes that "James Baird's Ishmael is in a class by itself, not only because it is primarily concerned with Melville's psychological experience of Oceania but also because of its complex Jungian approach."

Schedule:

• Week 1: Chapters 1-2 (i.e., Part 1)
• Week 2: Chapters 3-4 (i.e., Part 2)
• Week 3: Chapters 5-7 (i.e., Part 3, first half)
• Week 4: Chapters 8-11 (i.e., Part 3, second half)
• Week 5: Chapters 12-15 (i.e., Parts 4 and 5)

Ishmael:

• Project Muse

This meetup is part of a series on The Crescent and the Cross.