Melville and critical literacy

Within critical literacy pedagogy, readers can examine, analyze, and deconstruct social and cultural messages embedded in the text. As Linn (1996) argues, “the Great White Story” also means “misogyny and slavery,” and, unlike modernist theory, contemporary postmodern theory looks to “who has the money and power” (p. 136). Billy Budd, by Herman Melville has inspired a range of readings from the triumph of justice to the justice's miscarriage (Yanella, 2002).

Among others, interpretations of Billy Budd less commonly shared with students in the public school classroom refer to homosexuality in primarily male environments (Phillips, 2000). Melville scrutinized the rights of humans, the innocent against the backdrop of civilization, the value of an individual life, and the nature of social conflicts. Milder (2002) suggests the novella is an "ever-deepening inquiry" (p. 102) for truth through alluding to contemporaneous poetry, mostly Whitman's and Dickinson's verses. Coffler (2002) uses an aesthetic lens to claim that Billy as the actor of "the Handsome Sailor myth" is connected to joyous ancient Greeks and biblical martyrs while also celebrating the "mating of Hellenism and Hebraism" (p. 63) as a dialectic response to crisis of the western civilization. Reynolds (2002) argues that Melville's novella is a literary answer to the social and political events of 18th- and 19th-century Europe and America. Revolutionary riots correlate with Billy Budd's characters and plot: Harper's Weekly and New York Times editorials and illustrations about New York massive street strikes and the 1886 Chicago Haymarket tragedy.

During times of crisis, leaders use dominant language culture to supply a whole range of ways of talking about or constructing an object or event (Edley, 2003; Fairclough, 2003; Giroux, 2008). Melville’s interrogation of historical context, normalization, and hegemonic Western world in Billy Budd paralleled much discourse around the 2008 U.S. democratic state. Students in this study were invited into specific learning spaces where they could question what survival of the fittest was for the 30 million people in the United States who lived in poverty (Howard, 2007). They could deconstruct what life was like for children of one or more parents who served in the American wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. They could frame an argument around the dissolution of Glass-Steagle Act banking regulations, the forfeiture of civil rights via the PATRIOT Act, the weakening of the American dollar, or the inflated fuel prices as consequence of a military-industrial economy.

But, after analysis of a Disney film that reimagined maritime and military life, would privileged students connect fantasy to reality across time and space? Would privileged students link Billy Budd critically to contemporary U.S. political discourse around national security, terrorism, and militarism? Would privileged students debate democracy’s potential as a collective civic language and as a unifying device for inclusivity? Or, would privileged students recapitulate arguments from dominant ideologies through established and comfortable Judeo-Christian, individualistic, and historical lenses through which their privilege rose and was perpetuated?

Offer your insights on the nature of contemporary discourse at this pivotal time in U.S. history. How would you reconcile the messages of Melville in our postmodern U.S. society?