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"Entangled Rhyme": a dialogic reading of Melville's Battle-Pieces.(Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War novel)

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From: Leviathan
Date: 20071001
Author:Devries, David; Egan, Hugh

Herman Melville's agonized internal dialogues in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) recall Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the "relativizing of linguistic consciousness"--the play of multiple voices within a single text. (1) Especially remarkable is the way that Melville's collection refuses to capitulate to any easy emotional or intellectual reaction to the American Civil War. Throughout the work, a full range of rhetorical response to the conflict is on display. Melville's collection not only resists reducing events to the limited views of partisan ideology, but it also ...

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