Acknowledging the Bad Faith of Andrew Delbanco

The Bad Faith of Andrew Delbanco

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-bad-faith-of-leftist-intellectuals-today/ Delbanco’s review has remained in my thoughts for its glib disingenuousness. (Janice Fiamengo)

Clare Spark comments:

Andrew Delbanco is the king of the American Studies movement in academe, a movement that elevates "multiculturalism". Here is the index to my numerous blogs on multiculturalism: http://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multicu.... As for Delbanco, he looted my book on the Melville Revival to "prove" that Melville (a stand-in for Captain Ahab and American exceptionalism) was indeed an abusive husband and father. My book was devoted to showing that such an accusation was a rumor circulated by the "anti-imperialist" Left, and had no merit. Anything he writes is deeply suspect, but he is today's academic royalty.                                                                                   

Hershel Parker · 30 weeks ago

Clare Spark says that Andrew Delbanco looted her book. Well, he looted my biography of Melville for snippets from family letters when I had transcribed and quoted from. This saved him from doing any archival work. If you have not read his moving tale of fleeing Houghton Library after handling a letter to Melville, you shoiuld read it in his HERMAN MELVILLE. He was just too sensitive to do archival work because it violated the privacy of Melville. In several places after I began speaking out in 2007 I have protesting his lying about me in the NEW REPUBLIC in 2002 when he made it clear to his readers that I had merely fantasized the existence of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS. In 2002 he said I could not be trusted anywhere because I had fantasized these lost books, yet me mentioned them in 2005 as having existed, though he did not say how he had learned of their existence. I don't see any moral superiority here to RJ Ellory who is in the news now. In fact, I think it is worse for a chaired professor at Columbia to put his name to lies in the NEW REPUBLIC than it is to covertly attack your rivals on AMAZON--a chaired professor at Columbia is assumed to be honest.

http://www.civilwarmonitor.com/book-shelf/delblanco-the-abolitionist-imagination-2012

This is one of the last things Michael Fellman published before he died.

The Abolitionist Imagination (The Alexis De Tocqueville Lectures on American Politics) by Andrew Delblanco. Harvard University Press, 2012. Cloth, ISBN: 0674064445. $24.95.

This call and response volume grew from the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures on American Politics at Harvard. Andrew Delblanco provoked and the other authors responded.

Delbanco, a literary historian, holds named chairs in both American Studies and the Humanities at Columbia. I have not read his work before, but he clearly is an influential figure in his field. I am, of course, chary of drawing any conclusions about his wide-ranging scholarship from this lecture. But standing on its own it is one of the most annoying and ill-informed excursions into the study of abolitionism I have ever read.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112731/moocs-will-online-education-ruin-university-experience#

Comment in the NEW REPUBLIC

An old Melville biographer Hershel Parker isn't happy with Andrew Delbanco: "The Hunt for Herman Melville The best biographers are scholars on wheels assiduously dogging their subjects' footsteps" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324532004578358183100732300.html “Mr. Parker's greatest enmity is reserved for Andrew Delbanco, professor of American studies at Columbia University, who the biographer believes has deliberately tried to discredit him. Mr. Delbanco dismissed the first volume of "Herman Melville" in the New York Review of Books in 1997. He not only disparaged the new data that Mr. Parker contributed to Melville biography but also suggested that Mr. Parker invented details to suit his all-consuming quest to tell his subject's story—a nearly mortal blow to a biographer who has spent his entire career documenting every aspect of his subject's life. Mr. Parker quotes Mr. Delbanco questioning the former's characterization of Melville as "the first American author to become a sex symbol" and dismissing the evidence as merely a phrase taken from "one woman's fan letter." In fact, Mr. Parker says, he was relying on what he calls "many diverse pieces of evidence," including the responses of numerous men in contemporary reviews and newspaper notices who found "Typee" titillating because it described the sailor-narrator's romps with native women on a South Seas island. Mr. Parker cites one newspaper that greeted Mr. Melville's engagement announcement with the quip that the "fair forsaken Fayaway [the novel's South Seas heroine]" should sue for "breach of promise." Mr. Parker emphasizes that he was describing reactions to Melville's writing, not the behavior of the man: Mr. Delbanco's claim that the biographer portrays a strutting, "randy young man" attributes a vulgar idea to Mr. Parker that is nowhere in his text....." - arnon1

April 1, 2013 at 8:48pm

This is appropriate since it was in the NEW REPUBLIC that Delbanco in 2002 falsely accused me of merely surmising the existence of Melville’s POEMS, the existence of which had been known to everyone since 1922. Delbanco has never apologized. Very weirdly, in his 2005 book he acknowledges the existence of POEMS without accounting for his sudden inrush of knowledge. The NEW REPUBLIC has never apologized, either.