Roped Solidarity

The Aesthetics of Human-Animal Bonding in Melville’s Moby-Dick and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

Authors

  • Burak Sezer TU Dortmund

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.395

Keywords:

Solidarity, Spectrality, Rope , Seagoing Narratives, Whale, Marlin, Contract

Abstract

This paper investigates the literary aesthetics of ropes and argues that ropes represent a poetics of connection and disconnection between humans and other (non)humans in the spirit of new materialism. Drawing on Michel Serres’s philosophical contract theory, ropes can be regarded as the cords of an accord, which become taut and visible in seagoing narratives; in this paper, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1957) are discussed, as both novels devote much attention to the ship’s rigging or rope-work, as well as to the lines of attachment between humans and whales or marlins respectively. Both novels show that upon being roped, an aesthetics of spectrality is introduced, marked by a radical dissolution of binaries such as active/passive or subject/object. This paves the way for a poetics of solidarity, especially in those moments in which the ropes are taut and solid so that the pulls of either agent are felt.

Author Biography

  • Burak Sezer, TU Dortmund

    Burak SEZER is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund since 2024. He holds a Staatsexamen in English, Mathematics, and Education from the University of Cologne and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Rochester. With support from a doctoral scholarship at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities, he completed his dissertation on the poetics of mathematics in the work of Thomas Pynchon, forthcoming as Literary After Maths: Pynchon’s Mathematical Genealogy of America (Camden House). He has published articles on postmodernism, video games, human/animal migrations, vegan studies, and seagoing narratives. He is currently co-editing a special issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies on ecological protest, sabotage, and ecoterrorism, and a special issue of gender forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies exploring the intersections of gender, animal, and plant studies.

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Published

2025-03-12

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 2 (2024): Dis/Connection: Relations, Interactions, Disruptions

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Burak Sezer

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

How to Cite

Sezer, Burak. “Roped Solidarity: The Aesthetics of Human-Animal Bonding in Melville’s Moby-Dick and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, Mar. 2025, pp. 24-43, https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.395.