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MLA 2003--San Diego new views on Pierre.

Article Excerpt
An enthusiastic, standing-room-only crowd of San Diego MLA-ers attended the Melville Society's roundtable on Pierre. The panelists gave ten-minute presentations of their topics, leaving approximately thirty minutes for a wide-ranging discussion of various aspects of the novel. Among the topics addressed by panelists and audience alike were the novel's unusual comic tone; the importance of landscape to the novel; Melville and sexuality; and, perhaps most vociferously, the question of what, exactly, is Pierre, the published novel or the ur-novel that Hershel Parker "recovered" in his recent edition of Pierre. Herewith is a summary of the papers, most of which were presented in talk format. As one person in the audience remarked after the panel: "A scary thing about this panel is that it revealed that inside every very good twenty-minute paper is an excellent ten-minute paper."

Cindy Weinstein, California Institute of Technology, "We Are Family: Melville's Pierre": Weinstein suggested that the absence of the sentimental novel's donnee--the demolition of the biological family--is what destroys Pierre, the novel, and Pierre, the character. If we use Pierre as counter-factual evidence, it is clear that Gerry...