All Astir

The Eleventh International Melville Conference, “Melville’s Crossings,” will be held in London on June 27–30, 2017. Ed Sugden and Janet Floyd, the conference organizers, note that the location close to the River Thames, in the heart of London and ten minutes’ walk from 25 Craven Street where Melville stayed in 1849, “will allow for the reconsideration of the place of a number of problematic and less-discussed transatlantic texts and figures in Melville’s oeuvre.” They continue: “For us, the word ‘crossings,’ more than any other, defines how Melville related to Great Britain.” The CFP is available on the Melville Society website; please check <http://melvillesociety.org/>.

As we announced in the last issue of Leviathan, John Bryant, the longtime Editor of the Melville Society and the founder of the journal who presided over its first 15 years of publication, has received the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The Award was presented to John at the CELJ panel on January 9, 2016, during the Modern Language Association’s convention in Austin, Texas. In the citation, the CELJ judges recognized John’s more than two decades of service as Editor for Extracts and then Leviathan: “His career as a journal editor serving the Melville community is truly distinguished. He is highly respected among his peers and the quality of the journal he founded, Leviathan, is excellent. His journal editing work captures everything this award was intended to honor.” The citation quotes praise from John’s nomination letters, which pay tribute to his achievement in “creating and leading for 15 years a top-quality journal on a major literary figure and deepening our understanding, through a range of activities and writings, of the crucial links among editing, literary interpretation, and the writing process.” The nominators also acknowledge John’s “energy, passion, and devotion” and the scope of his mentorship: “One would expect him, of course, to bring the very best scholars to his journals. Just as assiduously he takes exceptional interest in younger scholars, international scholars, and artists and poets, writers a less adventurous editor might decide were not worth the trouble.”

In his response to the award, John reflected on his philosophy of editing with characteristic insight: “One job of a journal editor is to make himself (if he is a he) invisible. The editor is a midwife (even if he is a he). He assists in the delivery, and once the child is publishable and published, he stands aside and disappears into the woodwork, or rather returns as a name on the journal’s masthead. There is much to be said about this invisibility. A journal should be a place for free and open discourse, a forum where scholars of all generations share new ideas, a stage upon which their approaches are acted out. And the invisible editor is a stage manager behind the scenes, making sure that the actors deliver their lines in timely fashion, vetted and peer-reviewed, on a regular schedule, two, three, four times a year. But editors also ensure that the free and open discourse is reliable. We read every contribution—assess every paragraph, sentence, word—to make sure that the argument comes through, clearly, professionally, responsibly, intelligibly, and in a style that belongs to the writer not the editor. Helping writers strengthen their argument, find a voice, and see a purpose in the larger context of Melville studies can be some of the most satisfying contributions an invisible editor can make. In my years as Editor of the Melville Society, I have enjoyed the role of engaging with scholars in their work. I have learned from them and hope that, in turn, I have helped them learn more about Melville and arguments about Melville as they bring their essays into print. Leviathan, and Extracts before it, have been a twenty-five-year Seminar on Melville for me. These two journals have allowed me to enter into a community of scholars worldwide and a community of editors for other journals in other fields. I want to thank those who nominated me for the Distinguished Editor Award and the...