Melville and Bartleby: Facing the End of an Audience
"Bartleby" stages the terrible unworkability of faces, the equally terrible unknowability of our own.
Jon Thompson
Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University where he edits the online journal Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and the new poetry series, Free Verse Editions. His first collection, The Book of the Floating World, has just been reissued in an expanded edition. Thompson's essay on "Bartleby" is part of a book-length manuscript entitled After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing.