In the Arts, Literature, and Religion unit at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings, responding to a prompt that called for the examination of how modern authors rewrite holy scriptures, PhD student David Garner presented a paper entitled “Looming Disorientation: Divine Chaos in Moby-Dick.” The paper argues that, instead of merely combatting theodicy, Melville deploys romantic irony to fuse high and low themes, the divine with chaos, as a response to the death of God in the Romantic period. Melville does this, Garner argues, by rewriting and combining the books of Jonah and Job, and as such, he anticipates modernist James Joyce, who re-wrote another cornerstone of Western literature, The Odyssey.
The College of Arts