Northwestern One Foot in the Finite: Melville's Realism Reclaimed

One Foot in the Finite inspires a radical shift in our view of Melville’s project in Moby-Dick, for its guiding notion is that Melville uses his book to call into question the naturalism that distinguishes the early modern period in Europe. Naturalism is not only the idea that reality is exhausted by nature, or that there exists a domain of physical entities subject to autonomous laws and unaffected by human ingenuity; it also implies a counterpart, a world of pretense and deception, a domain of mental entities ontologically distinct from physical entities and therefore constituting a different realm. To naturalists, whales are part of the background of existing objects against which man assembles his various, subjective, rather arbitrary interpretations. But in Moby-Dick Melville casts upon the world a more ingenious eye, one free of the dualist veil. He confronts a basic misconception: that the contents of consciousness comprise a different order from physical life. He rubs out the dividing line modernity has drawn between the human world of names or concepts and the nonhuman world of plants, creatures, geological features, and natural forces. Melville’s philosophizing, carried by fiction, has dramatic consequence. It overturns our view of language as a system of mental representations that might turn out to represent falsely. Review "Crash! Now, you can hear it! Boom! What's left of the old, ivy-covered walls dividing literary theory from analytical philosophy are, at long last, tumbling down. Kim Evans and her new book One Foot in the Finite are in charge of the demolition. Evans's fluent expertise in all her subjects--including Melville studies and Wittgensteinian philosophy of language--runs deep and broad. Her writing is crystal clear, always incisive. Grab a copy of the book and watch the walls crumble! Stand back! Once those dreary walls are down, whole new disciplinary vistas open up." --Charles McCarty, professor of philosophy, Indiana University "A beautiful study of Moby-Dick that opens up not only a new way of reading the novel but also a new way of linking Melville's philosophy of language with that of Wittgenstein. This is an extraordinarily important work that brilliantly bridges the fields of literary criticism and philosophy." --Michael Puett, Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University "This slim yet ambitious volume offers an insightful and original reading of Moby-Dick, a reading directed toward students of both Melville and philosophy. Specialists will likely profit most from this brilliantly argued and carefully researched book, but its density of ideas may also please informed and intrepid readers outside the academy. Highly recommended." -- Choice Reviews "Rather than dwelling on Melville's doubts and ambivalences, as many literary critics do, Evans emphasizes his certainties. She contends that in Moby-Dick he is a literary realist in the classical--that is Platonic--sense, refusing the persistent dualism of mind and world in Western philosophy since Descartes and Locke. Melville shows how concepts are formed in human activity, and he verifies the ability of language, and especially of fiction, to connect the sensible with the ideal. In this bracing, consequential book, Evans alters our understanding of the relationships among literature, philosophy (especially Wittgenstein), and aesthetics." --Samuel Otter, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley "I much admire how K.L Evans brings together philosophy and literary criticism in order to provide an exciting account of what Melville sought in realism. Learned, lucid, and passionate, this book claims that realism is a less a matter of accuracy and range of accurate sensuous detail than a way of realizing the force of how those facts and the discourses accompanying them give shape to imaginative spaces. Realism for the most ambitious writers makes vivid the conceptual fra