All Astir

In a New York Times “Notebook” entry on 18 August 2013, Jesse Wegman reports that Herman Melville is a presence on the United States Supreme Court. Or at least in the mind of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Describing Ginsburg’s lecture at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in Cooper-stown, New York, about her fascinations with opera and the law, Wegman writes that she invoked Benjamin’s Britten aria, “I Accept Their Verdict,” from his 1951 opera version of Billy Budd. Ginsburg emphasized what she called “the conflict between law and justice” faced by Captain Vere. She spoke knowledgeably about theories that his character might be based partly on Melville’s father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, who served as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court; despite his own anti-slavery position and based on his understanding of the Constitution and of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Shaw returned the escaped slave Thomas Sims to his owner in 1851. The relationship between Melville’s writings and the law is, of course, a vibrant topic for scholars and critics. Gregg D. Crane, Deak Nabers, Richard A. Posner, Michael Paul Rogin, Brook Thomas, and Richard H. Weisberg, among others, have written about it, and the first issue of the interdisciplinary journal Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature (Spring 1989) was devoted to Billy Budd. Ginsburg’s interest in Billy Budd suggests a contemporary link between Melville and the judiciary, and one would like to hear more about her interpretation of the story and about the roles literature and opera play in her thinking. An avid opera-goer, she likely will attend Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick opera, which has its Washington, D.C. premiere at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Feb. 22, 2014. Local PBS stations around the country, as part of the “Great Performances” series, will broadcast the opera, filmed in San Francisco last fall, on November 1, 2013. Robert K. Wallace’s book, Heggie and Scheer’s Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera for the Twenty-First Century, was published last April. Melville and opera are in the air.

More than 150 scholars and students from a dozen countries assembled last month on the George Washington University campus in Washington, DC, for the Melville Society’s Ninth International Conference, “Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War Years and After.” Timed to coincide with the war’s sesquicentennial, the conference featured plenary talks by Melville and Whitman scholars—John Bryant (Hofstra), Ed Folsom (Iowa), Kenneth Price (Nebraska), and Elizabeth Renker (Ohio State)—and the work of nearly a hundred others. Speakers presented their research on a variety of topics related to the Civil War writings of the two authors, including slavery, race, and trauma; nationalism, division, and union; hospital care and military medicine; gender and class; sexuality, bodies, and the wounds of war; mourning and memory; and such important figures as Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. Two of the keynotes and other special sessions focused on digital editions on or related to Melville and Whitman and the nineteenth century. This splendid conference was organized by Christopher Sten and Joseph Fruscione, both of George Washington University.

Participants were treated to a gala opening night reception hosted by the Dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, a special showing of Walt Whitman manuscripts and memorabilia at the Library of Congress, an exhibit at the Luther Brady Art Gallery featuring contemporary art by Matt Kish and Douglas Paisley inspired by Melville’s Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man, a walking tour of Whitman’s Washington, and a concluding banquet at the nearby Arts Club of Washington, which included a choral program featuring musical settings of poems by Melville and Whitman.

Sponsors of the conference, in addition to the Melville Society, included the Washington Friends of Walt Whitman; the departments of English and History and the University Writing Program at George Washington University; the Mickle Street Review at Rutgers University-Camden; and the Literature Section at MIT. The following people served on the Conference Organizing Committee, in addition to Sten and Fruscione: Martin Murray, of the...