Wars for Oil: Moby-Dick, Orientalism, and Cold-War Criticism

Beginning with Edward Said's reflections on the media fall-out post 9/11, the ideological representations of which he likens to the mythical drama enacted in Moby-Dick, the article goes on to revisit the consensus achieved in Cold-War criticism of the novel in light of our awareness of the cultural construction of recent events. Specifically, the article questions the dichotomizing of the novel in terms of East and West and the critical casting of Fedallah and Ahab as scapegoats for collective guilt, drawing on the work of Rene Girard on the subject. In this way, it confirms the analogical justness of Said's evocation of Moby-Dick in relation to America's "collective imagination" of its relationship to the Near East and argues the book's power to re-orient and subvert that very representation by revealing both its mythical core and the collective acts of violence it seeks to conceal or sanction.