Size Matters

The following excerpt from The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife Across the Arts (Columbia University Press, March 2026) comes from a chapter titled “Size Matters,” which investigates issues of scale, magnitude, and sublimity that have dominated discussions of Moby-Dick since Melville’s rediscovery in the 1920s. The Melville Effect posits that our century is in the midst of a new Melville revival, one spearheaded by contemporary artists (rather than scholars as in the 1920s) who have made the author into their springboard for risk-taking projects that incorporate multiple genres and modes of media. As the chapter “Size Matters” indicates, many of these artists evince a fascination with size and immensity that mirrors Ahab's monomania; the following pages looks at a precedent for such obsessiveness in the cases of two mid-century modernist artists: Orson Welles and Gilbert Wilson. Their life-long attempts to adapt Melville’s masterpiece to any number of platforms but always falling short sets the stage for analyses of contemporary artists whose equal obsessions lead to a different understanding of sublimity and gigantism altogether.