Menetekel : The Black Whale and the Semiotics of Doom

Menetekel: The Black Whale and the Semiotics of Doom explores a literary and cultural phenomenon known as menetekel—a sign or warning of impending disaster—using Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, as a guide to understanding how such signs are read, interpreted, and contested.

Menetekel: The Black Whale and the Semiotics of Doom explores a literary and cultural phenomenon known as menetekel—a sign or warning of impending disaster—using Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, as a guide to understanding how such signs are read, interpreted, and contested. While Moby-Dick provides the interpretive framework, the book's focus extends far beyond Melville's novel to develop a broader theory of semiotic doom. Combining literary criticism, semiotics, cultural theory, and critical geography, the book traces a cartography of “writing on the wall” in North America, from the Pawnee Buttes of northeastern Colorado to the underground diary of the graffiti artist REVS in the New York City subway. Drawing on Herman Melville, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Fredric Jameson, and others, it develops a theory of menetekel and applies it to two distinct manifestations of writing “on the wall.” The book argues that menetekel is a sign that contains the conditions of its own destruction and derives its meaning from the surface on which it is written. By recasting Ishmael as a literary critic and theorist of interpretation, it offers a new methodology for reading signs, landscapes, monuments, graffiti, and other cultural inscriptions. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of literary studies, semiotics, cultural studies, American studies, geography, and media studies.