Glossary

According to Bryant, a narrative structure "trauma and transformation" perfected by Melville that continues to live on in American culture. Campomar expands the meme a filmic trope of ethnographic representation of South Island cultures in Hollywood movies.

A meme refers to a transmissible, minimal unit of cultural meaning (Dawkins 192). John Bryant repurposed Dawkins' term for Melville studies, suggesting that the Melville meme transmits a minimal narrative structure of "trauma and transformation" ("Wound, Beast, Revision" 203). His examples for models of this meme in Melville's work are Ahab, Pip, and Tommo, and proposes that meme van be found in the 2012 film "The Amazing Spiderman" (213). Jaime Campomar found a Melville meme in adaptations of "Typee" and "Omoo" that is used to represent the appearance and customs of Pacific Islander characters as culturally accurate and entertaining ("A Modern Peep" 191). Overall, Campomar argues that the Melville meme in these adaptations can be boiled down to a unique perspective on the South Seas that Melville the author provided (199).

Bryant, John. “Wound, Beast, Revision: Versions of the Melville Meme.” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Robert S. Levine, 1st ed., Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 202–18. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139149952.016.

Campomar, Jaime. “A Modern Peep at the South Seas: Melville s Presence in Some Hollywood Films from 1920s to the 1940s.” Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, vol. 12, no. 25, Oct. 2024, pp. 183–203. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2024.51.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 30th anniversary ed, Oxford University Press, 2006. Library of Congress ISBN.

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