ELL/ENG week2 lecture 1: Bartleby, Moby-Dick, and the Modern City – Comprehensive Study Notes

Narrative Position and Cultural Context

• The lecturer frames Melville as often writing from an autobiographical, sea-faring perspective in his early works (sailor-narrator) and notes how Moby-Dick, though famous now, was not highly successful in its own time. Bartleby the Scrivener emerges after this perceived failure, signaling a pivotal career shift for Melville.
  • Statistic cited: only $2{,}000$ copies of Moby-Dick were sold in Melville’s lifetime.
  • Bartleby is notable for its narrator being a lawyer, placing the narrative in a different position from Melville’s typical seafaring narrations; this shift invites analysis of first-person narration from a professional, legal vantage rather than a sailor’s eye.
  • The lecture highlights an assignment topic about how first-person narration functions, using Bartleby as a test case for narrative voice and perspective.
• The tutor situates both stories (Moby-Dick and Bartleby) in a common urban, American context, beginning in what is now Manhattan, a site that later becomes the World Trade Center area and Wall Street.
  • Manhattan is described as the hub of the American empire (and a global economy center in the mid-to-late 20th century).
  • The juxtaposition emphasizes a contrast: Melville’s sea-adventure discipline vs. Bartleby’s enclosed, claustrophobic office life.
  • The text suggests that the “bottle” of Bartleby is a story of enclosure and walls, not the open sea.
• The lecturer’s broader argument links literary form to economic and political transformations: from a maritime, guild-like, apprenticeship-based economy to a modern, bureaucratic, copy-heavy, document-driven market system.
  • The office in Bartleby becomes a microcosm of production and consumption, where workers produce deeds, contracts, wills, etc., yet most readers never see the inner workings of how these products are made.
  • This disconnection between production and consumption mirrors critiques of the American Dream: hard work and self-reliance do not guarantee prosperity for everyone; for some, the system erodes meaning and opportunity.
• The discussion of empire expands beyond Britain to the American empire, with reflections on South Africa’s contemporary relevance and how imperial histories shape national identities.
  • The lecturer notes the British empire is often foregrounded in discussions of history, but the American empire—especially in the 19th century—shapes modern life as well.
  • He mentions the older colonial entities, like New Amsterdam (1660) and New Netherland, to anchor a historical perspective.

New York, Empire, and the City as a Stage for Modernity

• The opening pages of these works situate readers in New York City, illustrating rapid urban development over the 19th century.
  • The speaker cites a biographical context: Melville’s life spans from a time when New York was a town of about $100{,}000$ people with oil-lit streets to an era with a population approaching $3{,}000{,}000$ by the end of the 19th century. (Years implied: 1819 for the birth of the urban novel form in America; 1891 as Melville’s death.)
  • The city’s transformation includes the Brooklyn Bridge, telegraphs, telephone, electricity, and a dense network of life that made urban hazards (like people falling into streets) a real concern.
• The biographical sketch places Melville’s life against the rise of American industrial capitalism and immigration. The arrival of a massive, wave-like immigration flow shapes the city’s labor market and social fabric.
• The tutor notes the 1660s context of Dutch colonial settlements (New Amsterdam) as a counterpoint to later British and American power structures, highlighting how imperial legacies shape the economic and cultural environment the stories inhabit.
• The lecture contrasts the early 19th-century, “medieval rhythm” of life with the late 19th-century, “modern industrial” pace, explaining how the city’s modernization reframes what labor, production, and social mobility look like.

The Prologue: Preamble, Characters, and the Social Topography of the Office

• The text begins with a prologue that presents Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut as foils to Bartleby; these are nicknamed workers whose names evoke consumption and appetite (Turkey, Nippers, Ginger Nut).
  • Each character’s nickname corresponds to something they do or symbolize about consumption: Turkey (the meal), Nippers (a lobster nickname), Ginger Nut (a biscuit).
  • The lecturer emphasizes how nicknames function as character-typing devices in Victorian and antebellum literature, often foreshadowing “ticks” or habitual behaviors.
  • Dickensian humor and naming conventions are invoked to explain how character is often reduced to recognizable traits and repetitive actions (ticks).
• The preamble also alludes to a fairy-tale or fable structure (often with two clocks and always a third clock), signaling that the story might begin in a recognizable genre and then deviate.
• Spatial topography of the office begins: the narrator’s chambers are described as being upstairs at a Wall Street address (Number Blank Wall Street), a deliberately blank space that can stand for anonymity or a composite of many places.
  • The interior is described with a skylight shaft and a view considered “deficient in life” from a painter’s perspective; this creates a sense of an abject, enclosed, almost sterile environment.
  • The blank number hints at a generalized, schematic space rather than a concrete, lived location, reinforcing the idea that what happens in the office could happen anywhere within the modern economy.
• The narrator contends with the presence of Bartleby as the entry that shifts the story’s genre: from a familiar set of office-dynamics to something radically new and disruptive.

Bartleby’s Entrance: The Arrival of the Silent Stranger

• Bartleby enters with a set of unusual textual cues: “Draw up of a recondite, documents of all sorts,” followed by “In answer to my advertisement, emotionless young man is emotionless.”
  • This contrast—an advertisement for labor versus a motionless, almost paradoxical job applicant—marks Bartleby as a challenge to the office’s routine pace.
• The famous refrain announces itself: “I would prefer not to.”
  • The line is repeated, mutating slightly with each repetition, becoming a motif rather than a mere refusal.
  • The narrator notes Bartleby’s face: “His face was leanly composed. His gray eyes didn’t show a wrinkle of agitation.” This calm, almost inhuman serenity underscores his resistance to the office’s demands.
• The request for copies escalates: the law office relies on ever-more copies of documents; the text notes the “quadruple quadruplicate” process, a bureaucratic horror that looms over the narrative.
• The structure and staging: Bartleby is placed near the folding doors, somewhat on the lawyer’s side of the space, hinting at his position within the power dynamic of the office and his encroachment on the lawyer’s mental space.
• The pivotal moment: Bartleby’s silence prompts the lawyer to seek explanation, culminating in a chain of questions about “what is wanted” and “the copies.”
  • The phrase “What is wanted? The copies, I said hurriedly” demonstrates how the office culture reduces meaning to documents and duplication.
• The motif of screen, wall, and confinement emerges: Bartleby disappears behind a screen, and the narrator approaches the screen, attempting to extract a reason for Bartleby’s behavior; the space becomes a symbolic barrier between autonomy and control.
• The biblical image appears: the narrator’s moment of self-recognition as a “pillar of salt” recalls biblical themes of self-estrangement and the fragility of human agency in a disenchanted world.

Thematic Core: Labor, Production, and the American Dream

• Bartleby is read as a stark critique of the modern, copy-driven economy where a commodity-like labor force is produced and consumed without deeper human connection.
  • The office is a “dungeon” where workers become exhausted and disillusioned, losing vitality as they age without meaningful upward mobility.
  • The narrator’s own reflections on apprenticeship and the old “merchant’s son” model highlight the transition from intimate, guild-like training to a bureaucratic, impersonal system.
• The essay situates Bartleby within Marxist critiques of alienated labor: workers perform tasks (copying documents) that produce others’ property while they themselves become estranged from the product of their labor and from their own humanity.
  • The famous line about the alienated worker as a “human Xerox machine” is invoked to illustrate the depersonalization of labor in late capitalism.
• The rise of a market economy broadens the divide between production and consumption: readers confront the distance between what is produced and how it is used, and who benefits from it.
  • The narrative emphasizes how modern mechanisms (copying, document replication) demand increasing precision and standardization, often at the cost of human meaning.
• The lecture connects this to broader cultural critiques: the American Dream is portrayed as a potentially “cruel optimism,” where hard work and thrift do not guarantee social ascent.
  • The “glut of labor supply” undermines apprenticeship culture and threatens upward mobility, especially for those who entered the law through traditional, family-based or class-based routes.
• The narrator’s references to “common usage” and “common sense” function as a critique of the social norms that rationalize exploitation or inefficiency as natural and inevitable.
• The lecturer hints at contemporary relevance: the prospect of so-called “bullshit jobs” and the automation of cognitive labor, foreshadowing debates about meaningful work in modern economies.

Narrative Voice: Language, Style, and Self-Consciousness

• The narrator emphasizes the textuality of narration: a teacherly, evaluative voice that treats Bartleby as a linguistic object as much as a person.
  • The narrator invites readers to think of the narrator as a construct of language rather than a literal person; this foregrounds the textual nature of storytelling.
• Language as performance: the narrator highlights his own rhetorical choices, describing his use of a “snug” retreat and the affect of negative constructions (e.g., * "Nothing is ascertainable about Barthesque"*; the show of redundancy in phrases like “I was not unemployed in my profession”).
  • The phrase “I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact that I was not unemployed” is noted as pompous yet revealing about self-perception and image management.
• The prose style is described as expansive and overtly descriptive, capable of sinking into digressions about names (John Jacob Astor), settings, and the rhetorical power of repetition.
  • The narrator’s long, indulgent sentences create a sense of “speechifying” that contrasts with Bartleby’s minimalism.
• The dance between time frames: first-person narration often weaves between the present moment of telling and a retrospective time of memory, which can interrupt or suspend the story’s immediacy.
• The tension between expressiveness and restraint is a recurring theme: the narrator’s expansive description vs. Bartleby’s limited semantic output raises questions about what counts as meaningful writing.
• The text cites a paradox: Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” can be seen as both a human refusal and a strategy that resists the logic of the office, challenging the narrator’s authority.

Dickens, Bleak House, Nemo, and Intertextual Echoes

• The lecturer references Charles Dickens as a cultural foil: Dickens’s character naming strategy (tickable traits and nickname-based identities) informs how Bartleby’s colleagues are initially understood as recognizable types.
• Bleak House is invoked as a contemporaneous touchstone; the text mentions Nemo (Nobody) in Bleak House, drawing a parallel to Bartleby’s enigmatic presence and to Dickens’s social critiques.
• The “Dickensian” approach to character—reductive labels, social ticks, and comic yet pointed observations—sharpens the contrast with Bartleby’s quiet, almost metaphysical resistance.
• These intertextual echoes serve to situate Bartleby within a broader 19th-century literary project that probes urban life, labor, class, and social order.

Space, Walls, and the Architecture of Modern Work

• The spatial imagery of the office—folding doors, screens, cubicles, a staircase, and a Wall Street address—frames Bartleby as a figure who occupies and transcends literal space.
  • The narrator’s chamber is literally separated by folding doors, while Bartleby stands in a threshold, a liminal figure between private and public space.
  • The screen serves as a barrier but also as a stage for Bartleby’s performance of stillness and resistance.
• The metaphor of enclosure is extended to the city: Manhattan’s walls, walls within walls, and the idea of a “dungeon” of modern labor suggest that the urban economy isolates and concentrates power.
• The imagery of consumption recurs: the office’s employees consume coffee, biscuits (ginger nuts), and time, while Bartleby appears to consume nothing, foreshadowing his act of withdrawal from the system.

Language, AI, and the Ethics of Prediction

• The lecturer pivots to a contemporary concern: how AI language models function by predicting the most likely next word, training on large corpora to maximize statistical accuracy.
  • This is connected to Bartleby’s world of copying and legal documents and to broader questions about how language is produced and valued in professional contexts.
• The discussion links historical stereotypes and printing practices to modern stereotypes and the automation of language, including the idea of stereotypes in movable type and how fixed patterns can become harmful when applied to humans.
• The lecture posits that Bartleby can be read as a challenge to the notion of “common usage” by resisting the typical production of language and meaning within the copy-laden economy.
• The instructor frames literary study as a method for interrogating AI and language technologies, urging students to examine how next-word prediction shapes thought, writing, and social understanding.

Key Passages and Essay Prompts to Explore

• Narrator’s voice and point of view:
  • How does the first-person narration enable or constrain our understanding of Bartleby and the law office?
  • In what ways is the narrator a “text” rather than a fully realized person? Consider phrases like "snug" and the long, elaborative sentences.
• Bartleby’s entrance and the turning point of the story:
  • Analyze the moment of Bartleby’s arrival: what does his presence reveal about the office and about human agency within bureaucratic systems?
  • The refrain “I would prefer not to” as a language of resistance and its effect on narrative momentum.
• Prologue versus main plot:
  • How does the preamble about Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut set up expectations, and why might Melville introduce Bartleby as a destabilizing force?
• Labor, economy, and the American Dream:
  • How does the text critique the apprenticeship system and the social ladder? What does Bartleby suggest about the possibility of advancement in a modern, document-driven economy?
  • Examine the tension between productive work and human fulfillment. Does Bartleby represent a failure of the system or a critique of its assumptions?
• Space, enclosure, and modernity:
  • Explore how architectural features (doors, screens, numbered walls) function as metaphors for power, surveillance, and alienation.
• Intertextual and cultural context:
  • How do Dickensian characters and Bleak House references color our reading of Bartleby? What is gained or lost by these comparisons?
• AI, prediction, and ethics:
  • How does the discussion of AI’s predictive text illuminate questions about originality, creativity, and the value of human labor?
  • Consider how stereotypes in language can be reinforced or resisted by both historical and modern technologies.

Numerical and Factual Anchors (for quick reference)

• Early American urban population snapshot
  • City population in the 19th century: from about $100{,}000$ to approx. $3{,}000{,}000$ by the end of the 19th century.
• Population and dates mentioned
  • New York in 1819: the city was a town with streets lit by oil lamps.
  • By 1891: population around $3{,}000{,}000$.
  • The 1660 date for New Amsterdam/New Netherland.
• Book and author context
  • Herman Melville lived from the early 19th century into the late 19th century; Moby-Dick published in 1851 (discussion of its initial reception).
  • Bartleby the Scrivener appears as part of Melville’s later career in a climate of skepticism about the American Dream.
• Cultural references and objects
  • The Brooklyn Bridge, telegraphs, and the growth of urban technologies are cited as markers of modernization.
• Figural and textual devices
  • The refrain I would prefer not to; the quadruple quadruplicate copies; the blank number for Wall Street; the screen and folding doors; pillar of salt moment; all indicate a heavy use of repetition, enclosure, and biblical allusion.
• Intertextual anchors
  • Dickens (Bleak House, Nemo/Nobody) as points of comparison for character and social critique.

Connections to Broader Themes and Real-World Relevance

• How modern economies produce a disconnect between labor and meaning: Bartleby’s fate and the office’s “dungeon” reflect enduring questions about meaningful work, alienation, and job satisfaction.
• The tension between tradition and modernity: apprenticeship and intimate training vs. impersonal, document-driven bureaucracy.
• The ethical implications of language and technology: how AI and language models might reproduce “common usage” biases and stereotypes, and how literature can teach critical literacy about these processes.
• The American Dream as a contested ideal: the lecture frames it as potentially cruel, optimistic, and unequal, prompting ongoing discussion about social mobility and economic justice.

Possible Essay Angles Based on the Transcript

• The shift from maritime to bureaucratic narration: how Bartleby signals a new narrative stance within Melville’s œuvre.
• The role of space and enclosure in depicting alienation: how the office’s architecture mirrors Bartleby’s resistance.
• Bartleby as a test case for first-person narration: what does the lawyer-narrator reveal about storytelling itself?
• The ethics of copying in a modern economy: analysis of the “quadruple quadruplicate” motif and its symbolic meaning for labor and authority.
• Dickensian influence and its limits: what does intertextual reference to Dickens tell us about 19th-century social critique and Bartleby’s ambiguity?
• AI and the future of literary study: how the discussion of predictive language models can shape our understanding of authorship, rhetoric, and critical reading.

Quick Reference Quotes from the Transcript

• "I would prefer not to."
• "Had there been anything ordinarily human about him, I would have had a stronger reaction."
• "What is wanted? The copies."
• "My chambers were up the stairs at Number Blank Wall Street."
• "quadruple quadruplicate" (the bureaucratic demand for copies)
• "a dungeon where broken men grow old" (Bartleby as metaphor for the office)
• "the office might be a sanctuary or a trap, depending on your point of view" (paraphrase of the narrator’s reflections)
• "the American dream" as cruelly optimistic (contextual critique)
• "this burgeoning legal, financial, contractual system… no technology for copying beyond the handheld pen" (the pre-technological limit of copying)