Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, published 175 years ago, is a parable of both man’s power and his impotence; of space’s cartographic conquest and the blind spot at the heart of every map; or, to couch it in scientific terms, of knowledge and its limits, or foundations, in the irredeemably unknowable. In an exclusive event,Tom McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s own tides and meridians to unpack the ways in which Melville overhauls the language of the Enlightenment and breaks open the horizons of modernity. Drawing on twentieth-century visual art as well as classical and eighteenth-century philosophy, he will reveal a “grammar of the indefinite” at work in Melville’s prose, and suggest that Moby-Dick’s ultimate battleground might be that of culture, language, and writing — that is, of literature itself. Tom McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. He is a recipient of the Believer Book Award and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, an Internationaler Literaturpreis finalist, and a two-time Booker Prize finalist. He is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. Since 2022, he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen and lives in Berlin.
yalereview.org/article/tom-mccarthy-indefinite-sublime
Learn more, follow us on social media and check out our podcasts: https://linktr.ee/sfiscience
Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, published 175 years ago, is a parable of both man’s power and his impotence; of space’s cartographic conquest and the blind spot at the heart of every map; or, to couch it in scientific terms, of knowledge and its limits, or foundations, in the irredeemably unknowable. In an exclusive event,Tom McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s own tides and meridians to unpack the ways in which Melville overhauls the language of the Enlightenment and breaks open the horizons of modernity. Drawing on twentieth-century visual art as well as classical and eighteenth-century philosophy, he will reveal a “grammar of the indefinite” at work in Melville’s prose, and suggest that Moby-Dick’s ultimate battleground might be that of culture, language, and writing — that is, of literature itself. Tom McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. He is a recipient of the Believer Book Award and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, an Internationaler Literaturpreis finalist, and a two-time Booker Prize finalist. He is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. Since 2022, he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen and lives in Berlin.
yalereview.org/article/tom-mccarthy-indefinite-sublime
Learn more, follow us on social media and check out our podcasts: https://linktr.ee/sfiscience
