Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener Annotated Research Proposal

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The story is about a relationship, not just the fact Bartleby does not 'care' to work.

Thompson, Graham. "Dead letters!....Dead men?': The rhetoric of the office in Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'. " Journal of American Studies 3-34.(2000): 395-411. Thompson analyzes the relationship between Bartleby and the unnamed narrator as a kind of a romance. Why is the narrator compelled to tell the story of Bartleby, long after it happened? Telling the story becomes a way of 'having' Bartleby and possessing him, the way the narrator cannot in life.

Weinstock., Jeffrey Andrew. "Doing justice to Bartleby." American Transcendental Quarterly

17.1 (2003): 23-42, 55. Weinstock analyzes Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a kind of postmodern mystery story. Bartleby's reasons are always enigmatic, and the frame tale, that of a 'dead letter' office with an anonymous narrator, intensifies this sense of meaninglessness of life. "The conclusion (or lack thereof) of 'Bartleby' points to the unsettling realization that every letter is potentially a 'dead letter'-that, as famously proposed by Jacques Derrida, a letter can always not arrive at its destination.

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Meaning can always go astray. If this is an inherent possibility of language, then "Bartleby" finally raises the question of what it means for meaning to arrive-of what it in fact means for something to mean at all." Bartleby is frightening to the narrator because he highlights the meaninglessness of work, something the narrator believes in.

Zlogar, Richard J. "Body Politics in 'Bartleby': Leprosy, Healing, and Christ-ness in Melville's 'Story of Wall- Street.' Nineteenth-Century Literature. 53. 4 (Mar., 1999): 505-529. The author examines various types of interpretation of the figure of Bartleby in literary criticism: as an artist, a resistor to the capitalist system, a madman, and also as a kind of Christ-figure. The author gives an overview of these various interpretations, with specific attention to Bartleby as a Christ figure. Examines Bartleby as a kind of social leper because of his refusal to work and the physical descriptions of Bartleby by the narrator, such as….....

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