Published: 2021-08-23

“Dead-wall reveries”. The Case of a Wall Street Scrivener

Jerzy Franczak Logo ORCID
Section: Essays and Articles
https://doi.org/10.31261/SSP.2021.18.05

Abstract

This article offers a reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, which has been interpreted countless times. Jerzy Franczak describes the operations of “Bartleby’s factory” and polemically refers to all the readings that attribute a subversive and community-forming potential to the idiosyncratic formula of resistance repeated by the protagonist. The trope of the wall is central to Franczak’s line of interpretation. He understands it as the protagonist’s projection of external necessities: unchanging rules that govern the social world. By supplementing Marxist approaches (especially that of Leo Marx) with concepts taken from Jacques Rancière’s writings, Franczak is able to develop a perspective which weakens the deterministic vision of an individual oppressed by the socioeconomic destiny. In Franczak’s interpretation, Bartleby is a victim of his own fatalism, while the lawyer-narrator, commonly portrayed as an embodiment of the system of power, is a political entity whose project of building a shared platform for understanding and acting falls through.

Download files

Citation rules

Franczak, J. (2021). “Dead-wall reveries”. The Case of a Wall Street Scrivener. Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne [Silesian Journal of Polish Studies], 18(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.31261/SSP.2021.18.05

Cited by / Share

Vol. 18 No. 2 (2021)
Published: 2021-11-10


ISSN: 2084-0772
eISSN: 2353-0928

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

This website uses cookies for proper operation, in order to use the portal fully you must accept cookies.