[Unaffiliated] Herman Melville, Neurodiversity, and Prosthetic Arts

[This event is hosted by Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. Registration is required.]

Join Leviathan on May 10 at 3 p.m. CDT for a conversation with authors Blake, Savarese, and Benedi about their recently published books The Prosthetic Arts of Moby Dick and Herman Melville and Neurodiversity.
Register for zoom link here

The Prosthetic Arts of Moby Dick, by David Haven Blake, offers the first book-length study of how physical disability shapes one of the world's most iconic novels. For generations, readers have viewed Captain Ahab's whalebone leg as a symbol of what he lacks, the limb he lost while fighting the white whale off the coast of Japan. David Haven Blake considers that ivory leg in a historical, medical, and geo-political context. Drawing on extensive archival research, he situates Ahab's prosthesis at the center of the novel's reflections on wounding, embodiment, and the role that Islamic cultures play in American narratives of revenge.
Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?: A Primitive Phenomenology, by Pilar Martinez Benedi and Ralph James Savarese. Focusing on the difference between lower-level perceptual processes in the “neural unconscious” and higher-order thought in the frontal lobes, this open access book shows how Herman Melville sought to reclaim the fluid world of the sensory, with its precategorical and radically egalitarian impulses. By studying this previously underexamined facet of Melville's work, this book offers an essential corrective to the “pathology paradigm,” which demonizes departures from a neurological norm and feasts on pejorative categorization.