Eric Wertheimer, ““Jupiter Underwritten: Melville's Unsafe Home”” (pp.176––201)
Taking Herman Melville's short story ““The Lighting-Rod Man”” (1854) as my interpretive reference point, in this essay I seek to understand how the idea of accidental loss was critical to the unfolding of Melville's career as a writer. The story manages to satirize commercial language as well as the discourses of safety and insurance underwriting that were part of Melville's bitter experience with his own property——whether as a homeowner or author. Moreover, the thematics of safety are discussed in the contexts of the legal and philosophical currents within the historical period, showing how Melville participates in a response to modernity that was uniquely centered on a critique of language.
This essay simply asks how “the culture of the pretext” prepares a nation not just for a war, but for modern war, with its peculiar mediational circumstances. Focussing on James Madison and his arguments and stratagems leading to the War of 1812, the essay briefly describes and conceptualizes the manufacturing of an emergency that mobilizes a public inclined to fragmentation and dissensus. The constitutional directives laid out by republican print textuality are, in this argument, stressed in ways that endure through American civic and political life.
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