'The Town-Ho's Story' in Herman Melville's Novel 'Moby-Dick'. The Destroying Power of Masculine Rage and Pride

Seminar paper from the year 2024 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (English and American Studies), course: Categories and Conventions: The Blue Humanities: Water as Matter and Metaphor in North American Literature, language: English, abstract: This term paper explores the chapter 'The Town-Ho's Story' of Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851) in two aspects: its intertextual connection with the myth of the feud between Agamemnon and Achilles and its role in the entirety of Melville's work. Intertextual theory, chosen as the key theoretical framework for this paper, provides the grounds and analytical instruments for registering similar patterns in seemingly distant - chronologically and thematically - texts. This, on the first glance, is the case of the Iliad (Homer) and Moby-Dick. However, through bringing them together and comparing what and how the authors wrote them, some symptoms and problematic points of our culture can be discovered. Here, those will be unharnessed masculine rage and pride as a cause of destruction.