Talk:Moby-Dick

"decline" vs. "conjugate"

Dear all The current version says "Pip declines the verb "look"."

It would be better to write "Pip conjugates the verb "look"."

One declines nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, etc. Verbs are always conjugated. Emiru678 (talk) 18:48, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Style & Carlyle

Melville borrowed much more from other writers than writers usually do. The writing style of MD is perhaps complex enough to warrant subsections on the most important specific influences. The top three are the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. As it stands now, the second paragraph of Assimilation of Shakespeare sets forth, with citations, how the creation of Ahab was influenced by a lecture of Coleridge on Shakespeare's main characters. Yet the final paragraph of the subsection on Carlyle claims that it was Carlyle who made Ahab possible. Further, the sentence accounted for with note 61 makes it look like Carlyle influenced the whole book, but the publication cited in note 61 is about "Carlyle and the Conclusion of MD". Last, the sentence accounted for with note 62 has the phrase "MAY have been borrowed from Sartor", while the number of books that are proven sources is already too large to be covered entirely in this article.

My proposal, then, is that only those authors who, according to scholars, have influenced the style of the whole book, not just a few chapters, are candidates for a subsection of their own. MackyBeth (talk) 22:25, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Good to refine and develop these points, as the article is still rough in many respects. But I'm not clear what your proposal would specifically do. Cut the Carlyle section? Qualify the sentence referenced by note 61? ch (talk) 20:53, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Just thinking out loud here. Imagine this article would have FA-status. Besides Shakespeare, the stylistic influence of the Bible and Milton may be large enough to warrant subsections of the Style section, while I don't think the article will still have a subsection on the stylistic influence of Carlyle alone. But I am not yet familiar enough with the scholarship on the lesser influences on MD to have a firm conviction about what needs to be said about them, and about which of these influences. O, BTW: it is of course not my own opinion that the Bible, Shakespeare and Milton are the most important influences, I read that in the Introduction of Mary K. Bercaw-Edwards 1987 book on Melville's Sources. MackyBeth (talk) 22:29, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

But there are quite a few references to C's influence on the whole book, for instance, as "prototype" for his iconoclastic style and Ahab as an appopriation of C's "Hero". ch (talk) 22:52, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

As I said above, what Arac (1989) says about the influence of Carlyle's "Hero" seems to me a misattribution: the real influence here is Coleridge's lecture on Shakespeare, as identified in 1940. But Wikipedia editors will have to follow what scholars think of this, of course. The biographies of Parker and Delbanco should discuss Carlyle if they think Arac is convincing enough. MackyBeth (talk) 10:05, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Checked Delbanco and Parker in the library. The influence of Carlyle's "Hero" is well established: not only do both Delbanco and Parker mention that title as a source, but Parker refers to the "Explanatory Notes" in the 1949 Hendricks House edition of MD, so this has been known for a long time. Parker, on page 699-700, enumerates the influences upon MD, with short specifications of what kind of influence each source exactly had. This list is long, and starts with the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, so apparently the major influences are named first. Carlyle appears somewhere in the middle of the list. Which means, that if Carlyle should have a subsection, then all of the sources above him are candidates for one as well, and that would be something for a separate Wikipedia article called something like "Literary influences on Moby-Dick." MackyBeth (talk) 18:58, 28 April 2024 (UTC)