Alive again, despite the TABLET, and Writing

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/105843/the-last-critic-turns-100

http://www.amazon.com/Melville-Biography-Narrative-Hershel-Parker/dp/0810127091/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342186536&sr=1-1&keywords=%22MELVILLE+BIOGRAPHY%3A+AN+INSIDE+NARRATIVE%22

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is amazing, and deliciously different from Hershel Parker’s string of non-retirement works—intricately rooted in verifiable facts, precise and reliable as ever, but juicier, braver, and better than anything he has done before now. This Inside Narrative masterfully and entertainingly blends intellectual autobiography, the untold and unexamined history of Melville scholarship, and instructive case studies in the praxis of biography. Research hounds like me, thrilled by Parker’s tales of the hunt, will delightedly follow him on the trail of evidence and savor the joy of discovery. Academics across the disciplines will be challenged by Parker’s insistent and cogently argued distinction between scholarship and criticism. All readers who cherish truth-seeking and truth-saying will be shocked then heartened by Parker’s exposés of bad scholarship, fake scholarship, and the “mutual admiration society” of celebrity critics. As intellectual autobiography Parker’s Inside Narrative is compelling and revealing. In essence Parker demonstrates why his two-volume Melville biography is matchless in scope, depth, accuracy, integrity, and humanity. As the wonderfully intimate autobiography of the biographer and history of the biography, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative powerfully reveals what you need to acquire, and what you have to give up, to be maestro.--Scott Norsworthy-- Bibliographical Associate on The Writings of Herman Melville and author of “Melville’s Notes from Thomas Roscoe’s The German Novelists.”

Hershel Parker's Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is the cap-stone to the vital contributions he has made to the stony field of Herman Melville scholarship. The book infuses humor, irony, and scholarly insight to the art of understanding Melville and his entire body of work, along with a sobering survey of Melville scholarship from the past 100 hundred years (both its groundbreaking accomplishments and its more corrosive counterparts).This book stands as a stoic testament to a field of research flamed solely by zeal and Spartan tenacity. Parker's process arrives to the truth of the matter in a field littered with the rambling surmises of New Critics hoping to eradicate authorial insight in favor of critical skewerings. Parker not only stands for the tried and true ways of literary tradition, but also embraces the potential of the Internet and blogging to enable the potential of new information as well as finding new ways to reach an audience that continues to expand generation after generation. Herman Melville: An Inside Narrative has reshaped my own aesthetic and technique toward literary biography as well as brought new appreciation for Hershel Parker and that ungraspable phantom, the spirit of Herman Melville, that fuels the entire scope of his scholarly cosmos.-- Paul Maher--Author of Kerouac: His Life and Work and Jack Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of “On the Road.”

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative takes us on an extraordinary journey through the life and mind of Hershel Parker, the world's greatest Melville scholar. Parker vividly retraces his decades as workaday Champollion when he dug through libraries from New Orleans to Hampstead Heath, sacrificing his eyes on newspaper microfilm and 19^th-century handwriting as he sussed out the details of the artistic development and financial struggles of Herman Melville. From his harvest of hundreds of primary documents, Parker then wove their revelations into his authoritative and compelling two-volume biography (1996 and 2002).Parker’s life's work illustrates Beethoven's great maxim, that genius is the art of taking pains. In Melville Biography Parker frankly describes the uproar his serial revelations about Melville's life created within the clubby little world of self-anointed and self-important Melville critics, all strangers to the archives. This new book will enthrall not just Melville fans, but all fans of great literature. It is must reading for anyone who aspires to research a credible, fact-based biography. It is also must reading for anyone who cares about creating great art, for in its tales of triumph, conflict, and suppression at long last overcome, can be found all that one puts at hazard in setting out on such an unfashionable voyage. In Melville Biography, Parker embodies the title of another book on life-writing, Biography as High Adventure.-- James Hime, Edgar finalist for The Night of the Dance, author of other Jeremiah Spur mysteries and the Kindle Book, Three Thousand Bridges.

               Imagine our gain if Richard Ellmann had reflected in a book on his lives of Yeats, Wilde, and Joyce. Like Ellmann, Parker has devoted his career to biography, and now in this Inside Narrative offers his harvests of biographical research and thought. Never before has a literary biographer reflected as deeply and frankly on the craft of life-writing and the fate of a documentary biography as Parker does in this companion to his two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography. Lovers of literary biography will rejoice at the revelations of Parker’s arduous research, his stunning discoveries, his dazzling handling of mundane evidence, and his hard-won theoretical convictions. Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is part autobiography and historiography of Melville biography; part exposé of the follies of ahistorical writings on Melville by disciples of the New Criticism and their archivophobic successors; and part a series of exemplary demonstrations of a biographer at work, profiting from evolving online and digital archival resources as well as his decades of traditional archival research. Melville Biography leaves us knowing Herman Melville more intimately than ever, points new researchers toward biographical riches on Melville yet unexplored, offers practical guidance and heartfelt inspiration to any life-writer, and enriches all lovers of literary biography. --Robert A. Sandberg –Discoverer- transcriber of Melville’s “House of the Tragic Poet” and design editor for The New Melville Log.

The TABLET efficiently and kindly erases errors and rewrites history! I am spelled right and am a survivor!

Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the biography of Henry James, and Hershel Parker wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.
Of that pioneering generation, one of the last survivors is M.H. Abrams, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on July 23. (Abrams is also still publishing: In August, Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) Abrams’ name will be familiar to just about every English major of the last half-century, if only because it appears at the top of the spine of each edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams created in 1962.

Now I learn from Paragraphs 2 and 3 that I am Jewish and Dead

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/105843/the-last-critic-turns-100

A link sent me by Mel Livatino tonight.

Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the biography of Henry James, and Herschel Parker wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.
Of that pioneering generation, there is only one major figure still living: M.H. Abrams, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on July 23. (Abrams is also still publishing: In August, Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) Abrams’ name will be familiar to just about every English major of the last half-century, if only because it appears at the top of the spine of each edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams created in 1962.


They misspelled my name and misreported my death, but it is a lovely article on Mike Abrams. I love Mike and wish him a long life in his new century!
P.S. Thank you, Mike, for your critique of my period headnote to THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE in 1978!

A High-Toned Virginia Woman Goes Bad

This is how I got to descend from the good second wife, Milly McGehee (or M'Gehe or another variant) rather than the highborn and high-toned but immoral Mary Terrell Chiles, a disgrace to the Quakers but a woman who knows her own mind and is used to having her own way.


From the North Carolina Gazette, 7 April 1775, a delayed publication--because Joseph M'Gehe was ready to marry again? Or because of another reason? This is one issue of 12 that survive for the year 1775.

                     

Signed and acknowledged in the Presence of Robert Goodloe and Thomas Jackson.

Sutherland's TLS Letter on Indexing Deserves Wide Readership

Indexing

Indexing

Published: 6 July 2012

Sir, - Three monographs have come my way, as a reviewer, recently: Michael Anesko, Monopolizing the Master (Stanford University Press), Leah Price, How To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press), Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott (Oxford University Press). They are impressively learned. But the learning is impaired by their indexing - a systemic impairment in academic monographs nowadays, I think.

Endnotes (whose large-scale replacement of footnotes is another issue) make up a substantial portion of the book; up to one third of the total text in one case. The bodies of the works are conscientiously indexed - but not the notes. Given the expansiveness of the endnote - up to 500 words or more - a lot of the scholarly life, and most of the skirmishing, is relegated to them. Fellow scholars are not mentioned in the text, or in the index, but figure there - obscurely in the book’s undergrowth. So too with conceptual topics important to the books’ arguments.

The Society of Indexers, whose conference is taking place in Brighton this year, July 11-13, regularly brings this practice to the notice of academic publishers. There is, probably, a cost issue. But it constitutes a disservice to the authors whom the publishers, in other ways, serve so well.

JOHN SUTHERLAND Department of English, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1.

"MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY": Amazon now has Gorgeous Fore-Edge Painting up to View

http://www.amazon.com/Melville-Biography-An-Inside-Narrative/dp/0810127091

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative

by Hershel Parker

Northwestern University Press | Hardcover 

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker's history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by his intimate working relationships with great Melvilleans, dead and living. The first part is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume life of Herman Melville. Next, Parker traces six decades the persistent war New Critics have waged against biographical scholarship on Melville. American literary critics, he finds, impose New Critical theories of organic unity on Melville's disrupted career even while truncating his body of work and minimizing his aesthetic interests. Parker celebrates the "divine amateurs" who use new technology to discover dazzling Melville stories and also lauds the writers of literature blogs as potential redeemers of academic and mainstream media reviewing. In the third part, Parker invites readers into his biographical workshop and challenges them with ambitious research assignments. Throughout this bold book, Parker seeks to reinvigorate the all-but-lost art of scholarly literary criticism and biography.
 

There is a fourth part to the book that may interest anyone concerned with biography in general, not just Melville biography. The endnotes constitute a symposium in which views of many biographers, most often British, are tested against Parker's experiences with Melville. Topics include theories which relate biography to fiction, invasions of privacy by biographers, the idea that the biographer enacts a kind of countertransference, the recklessness of the "Brainstorm" site of the Chronicle of Higher Education,the problem of gaps in evidence, the constrictive power of prior knowledge, the importance of working in small "time-spans," the New Critical faith in the sanctity of texts, the folly of seizing on one determinative turning-point, the redefining of archives out of existence, the question of suitable tone and language, strategies for not confusing fiction with autobiography, the occasional necessity to make "exposition simulate narrative," the serendipitous finding something significant while looking for something else, the seeming "fact" which undercuts an elaborate theory, the specter of the rival biographer, the group therapy that occurs when biographers talk about reviewers, the folly of seeking the "essence" of one's subject. By listening to the voices of dozens of biographers excitedly describing their working methods, their obstacles, and their triumphs, Parker makes his inside narrative an essential resource for biographers and students of biography.  The Index is a full, meticulous guide to the players in Melville biography and the issues that have dominated Melville biography. Recently some prominent academic presses have stopped including names and concepts in Endnotes in the index, but MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE very carefully includes both sorts of referrences in the index so that skirmishes and bloody battles among biographers of Melville and other writers are highlighted along with areas of agreement. Even for readers not especially interested in Melville or Melville biography the endnotes constitute a fascinating, accessible guide to what has been going on in the theory and practice of biography in the last half century and more.

Timely TLS Letter about Indexing

There’s a bitter complaint from the erratic John Sutherland in the TLS that got here today, the issue for 6 July 2012. This time Sutherland is right-headed about presses (Stanford, Princeton, and Oxford are named) for not indexing endnotes: “There is, probably, a cost issue. But it constitutes a disservice to the authors whom the publishers, in other ways, serve so well” and a disservice to users who might want to know which fellow scholars figure in the endnotes (where “most of the skirmishing” is relegated) and want to know which “conceptual topics important to the books’ arguments” figure there. 

The indexing of the endnotes in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE is good with conceptual topics such as the New Criticism and the New Historicism and the relationship between history and biography as well as with skirmishing scholars, among whom Sutherland in one of his low-bottom reviewing moments figures briefly but memorably.

Sutherland says the Society of Indexers regularly protests to academic publishers about the trend toward not indexing the endnotes. Good for Northwestern University Press.

Simon Morley, the graduate student TLS gave THE POWELL PAPERS to, did not read it all and did not mention the highly amusing and informative index on which I lavished six weeks. Dr. Valorous Coolidge, in particular, ought to have been celebrated in the review. Where else do you learn about a murderer who took money for doing the autopsy on the corpse of his victim?

Is there life after indexing? Is there indexing after indexing

Almost through [?] indexing MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE