Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson’s 1947 study of Herman Melville and Moby- Dick, is an anomalous book. On the one hand, it is a foundational text of Melville Studies, establishing Melville as an American Shakespeare and helping to solidify Melville’s elevated position in a canon of American literature. On the other hand, Call Me Ishmael also offers a bizarre recasting of Melville’s entire oeuvre, transforming the image of the nineteenth-century writer at a moment in which early practitioners of American Studies were consolidating a specifically “national imaginary” with respect to literature and history. Call Me Ishmael is simultaneously a key document of an emerging American Studies and a proleptic critique of the nationalist project of the disciplinary field. Blurring the lines between literary artist and scholarly critic, Olson sought to rethink Melville’s leviathan by reimagining Melville’s own imaginative reshaping of the world system in 1851. Olson accomplishes this in part by establishing Melville’s literary and historical project as a discrete segment of a grand, 3,000-year exploration of time and space. Olson thereby wrenches the author from the hands of a nascent American Studies, whose practitioners were in this process of enshrining Melville as the central figure in a national program coded as the American Renaissance, and Olson projects a baroque Melville not confined to or emblematic of any nationalist cultural project.

In this chapter, I look at Olson’s Call Me Ishmael in the context of the Melville Revival and the academic canonization of Melville in the emergent field of American Studies, particularly as associated with an imagined American Renaissance. Olson arguably occupied significant positions in both movements. Through his early interest in Melville, Olson came of age during the Melville Revival of the 1920s and 1930s. He befriended Melville’s granddaughters, Eleanor Melville Metcalf and Frances Osborne, who gave him access to a wealth of material, including Melville’s own set of Shakespeare volumes, with which Olson was able to develop so much of his own argument. And, as a student of Perry Miller, among others, in the newly established History of American Civilization program at Harvard University, Olson stood at a ground zero of the new and burgeoning field of American Studies.