Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Water, fire, and stone : images and meaning in Melville

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/zk51vk289

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  • This thesis is a study of Herman Melville’s symbolism. I have chosen to investigate the elemental images of water, fire, and stone in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852), and Clarel; A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). This work is a semiotic study, insofar as the association between image and meaning is personally assigned and therefore to a degree inscrutable. This work is a structuralist investigation insofar as structuralism is interested in images that are repeated in separate works by one author, and how these repeated images and their possible meanings cohere. Also related to my structuralist inquiry is how meaning is conveyed. I argue that Melville uses symbols in different ways: meaning is unfixed, his symbols are complex, they overlap, and he sometimes inverts or subverts the meanings of traditional symbols—and also, that Melville’s symbolism is derived, or modeled, consciously or unconsciously, on his skeptical and unfixed spiritual state.
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