Search results for ""Author Will Morrisey""

Will Morrisey again considers the political dimensions of literary classics, as previously seen in Melville’s Ship of State (2019). His attention to Shakespeare’s comedies is a reader’s and playgoer’s delight. INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The Politic Character of Shakespeare’s Comedy PART ONE: THREE REGIMES: OLIGARCHY, ARISTOCRACY, MONARCHY Chapter One: Shakespearean Comedy: Two Points on the Compass Chapter Two: Gentlemen and Gentlemanliness Chapter Three: Royal Dreaming PART TWO: THE RULE OF LAW Chapter Four: Comic Errors, Legal Slapstick Chapter Five: What Will You? PART THREE: THE COMEDY OF MORALS Chapter Six: Taming Our Shrewishness Chapter Seven: What Does Shakespeare Mean When He Says, “As You Like It”? PART FOUR: THE COMEDY OF POLITICS Chapter Eight: Is All Well That Ends Well? Chapter Nine: The Geopolitics of Love Chapter Ten: The Wisest Beholder SHAKESPEARE’S POLITIC MERRIMENT

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This book discusses the cultural intentions of the founders of the first thoroughly commercial republic, the United States. The typical book on 'the culture' takes the view that commercial republicanism is the enemy of culture; this book tells a much more complex story, and measures the benefits and deficits of commercial republicanism in a way that does not sleight the very substantial achievements of commercial republicanism. The book looks at several critics of the commercial republic, 'left' and 'right'. These writers include Emerson, Whitman, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dewey, and Pound. The book concludes with chapters on two very different writers who take a comprehensive view of culture, nature, and the commercial republic: Allan Bloom and Jane Austen. Contents: Acknowledgments; Preface; Introduction: The Statesmanlike Sources of American Culture; Victorians Contra Commerce; Natural Right and the American Intellectual; American Historicist-Poets: Holmes and Whitman; An American Fascist: Ezra Pound; The American Left and the Culture of Sophistry; An American Philosopher?; The Politics of Self-Knowledge: Mansfield Park and the Refounding of the English Aristocracy; Conclusion: The Arts of Satiation; Endnotes; Index; Biographical Note.

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The "battle of the books" between ancient and modern continues to have decidedly un-bookish consequences. The French Statesman Charles de Gaulle fought an incident in this war, founding a political regime in modernity whose principles transcended modern political philosophy. De Gaulle rejected both bourgeois democracy and anti-bourgeois totalitarianism, framing a republicanism hospitable to civic responsibility and human greatness. Reflections on De Gaulle, first published in 1983, remains the only book centered on textual interpretation of each of de Gaulle's major works, themselves part of his lifelong enterprise to bring a stable republican government to France. Will Morrisey examines de Gaulle's works, from La discorde chez l'ennemi, his incisive critique of the German elites' quasi-Nietzschean overreaching in the First World War, to Mémoires d'espoir, his magisterial account of the founding of the Fifth Republic. The text has been corrected and entirely reset in an attractive format for greater ease of use.

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William Morrisey unravels Melville’s “loomings” of the great whale, showing them to be important threads of politics and theories of governance. The Young America of Melville’s day valorized popular sovereignty such that moral law suppressed by the majority rule was bringing America to state of being that could only then be ruled by the mightiest of the mighty––the great Leviathan, who reigns in the boundless chaotic sea separated from “stable land.” The force of the created world and the necessary ordering achieved through conquest are dominating themes of Melville’s great tale, but as Morrisey observes approaching the great whale, ruler of the untamable seas, is for captain (ruler) an opportunity to destroy it. But for the sailor (the ruled) being close to the white whale is a moment for understanding, and in turn of being understood. Yet in what sense is being seen, for human beings of moral bearings, not also an impulse to self-impose? “The modern Ishmael wants to see, not to kill, perhaps to be seen, and surely not to be killed. Americans too need to come to terms with the white whale, if they are to perceive reality as it is without bringing destruction upon themselves.” Is Melville proposing an utterly new philosophy of ruler and ruled, of a proper gauge of the immeasurable chaos that is nature? “Does Melville also intend to be a founder in the ‘New World’?” Morrisey’s study is a compelling look at the early political moments of a new nation, but one that at the time perceived itself as already aging and maturing in the process of political voyage and adventure. Dangers lie ahead, Melville seems to warn, and in his disenchantment of the vigor of the Young America he once endorsed he tells the story of what really happens when democracy is idealized and the surrounding waters of chaos are thereby veiled; and yet also of what happens when one would seek to command the chaos only to transform into the unpredictably destructive prey he pursues, especially under the guise of moral outrage. Melville, like Ishmael, urges a new vision of both God and nature, and challenges the notion of rule in all its expressions. Americans, the people of the New World, are invited to be unafraid, but also careful. In wandering as on the open waters one wonders, beyond civic boundaries and conventions, and in that wonder one may finally come face to face with what is good and grand––but in beholding the great white whale, can one resist the urge to conquest, now that he is likewise by the leviathan beholden? Is the rule of man and the coronation of a specific dialectic of power an untenable victory, given that “‘Nature is nobody’s ally’: it wounds or kills any person or nation that violates it, impartially”? Morrisey writes with lucidity and weaves together elements of history, literature, politics and perhaps his own affinity for Ishmael’s passenger spirit to reveal just how broad and boundless of a narrative Melville’s Moby Dick truly is.

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