白鲸文献综述读后感.docx

Literature Review of Moby Dick Studies IntroductionHerman Melville is a typical American writer who was recognized after death. It has been almost 100 years since Melville Revival in 1920s, and there are many stuy on Moby Dick in home and aboard from various angles. This paper attempts to summarize critics from various journals, which focus on the narrative theory, the authors attitude toward capitalism and the contradiction between Puritanism?and?Transcendentalism embodied in this book.Narrative TheoryThe reviewer described Moby-Dick as three books rolled into one: ?an encyclopaedia of sperm whale, a fiction of sea adventure, an essay collection of philosophical questioning.In terms of the non-narrative chapters,they are structured around three patterns: first, the nine meetings of the Pequod with ships that have encountered Moby Dick. Each has been more and more severely damaged, foreshadowing the Pequods own fate. Second, the increasingly impressive encounters with whales. In the early encounters, the whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the massive assembling of whales at the edges of the China Sea in The Grand Armada. A typhoon near Japan sets the stage for Ahabs confrontation with Moby Dick. The third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it can be divided into two subpatterns. These chapters start with the ancient history of whaling and a bibliographical classification of whales, getting closer with second-hand stories of the evil of whales in general and of Moby Dick in particular.In terms of the narrative chapters, it’snarrative architecture is an idiosyncratic variant of the bipolar observer/hero narrative, that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other, with Ishmael the observer and narrator.In addition, one of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres, such as sermons, drea