Enantiosemy and Transcendental Homelessness in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight
Open AccessMy subject is enantiosemy and its relation to what the literary critic György Lukács termed transcendental homelessness as they figure in North American literature. In linguistics, words that house antithetical meanings -- that is, that simultaneously mean themselves and their opposite -- are known as enantiosemic, and this condition of lexical self-opposition is called enantiosemy. In this project, I broaden linguistic enantiosemy to show how its logic reveals a structure of thought that shapes how we perceive and experience the world more generally. I continue to use enantiosemy to describe this broader, conceptual structure of thought as I observe it in the texts I examine. Transcendental homelessness is, I maintain, the paradigmatic example of conceptual enantiosemy. In Chapters 1 and 2, I analyze enantiosemic paradox and ambivalence in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), paying particular attention to the novel’s frontmatter, as well as the contested meanings of geography, divinity, and orphanhood. In Chapter 3, I examine Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), noting how an enantiosemic logic pervades the text’s narrative structure as well as its engagement of peace and spirituality. I conclude the project with a reading of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018) in which I find that conceptual enantiosemy is at hand in the interplay between constructed lineages and uncertain geographies. The conceptual enantiosemy that I highlight in all three novels evokes a transcendental homelessness, which forms the through line I observe in these texts.
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