Capital District Council for the Social Studies (Albany, NY)
The National Humanities Center is pleased to present
Teaching Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
a live online professional development seminar featuring
Andrew Delbanco
Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
National Humanities Center Fellow
Please join us free of charge. Use promotional code TBS when registering.
Thursday, November 15, 2012 | 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (EST)
"I would prefer not to." With those words Bartleby, Herman Melville's New York law-copyist, turns himself into one of the most enigmatic and infuriating characters in all of American literature. With them he also disrupts the staid, ordered life of his employer. And with them, too, he withdraws from life until he ends his days curled up against a wall in a prison aptly named the Tombs. What does "Bartleby, the Scrivener" tell us about Melville's genius? What does it tell us about antebellum America, a society in which the impersonal values of laissez-faire capitalism clashed with the religious impulse to care for and about others?
Lunch for the event is sponsored by:
