Research Expertise and Interest

English, 19th century American literature, 17th and 18th century American literature, African American literature, Herman Melville, race in American culture, literature and history, discourse and ideology, word and image studies, close reading

Research Description

Samuel Otter has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. He served as department chair from 2009 to 2012. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close textual interpretation also can be deep and wide.

In his current book-in-progress, "Melville's Forms," he analyzes what “form” meant to Melville, in concept and in literary practice, with the hope that such an inquiry not only will illuminate the complexities of his career, which in its variety, scope, and duration continues to elude most readers and critics, but also will advance our understanding of this key term in literary studies. Across the chapters, he examines verbal form in terms of the relationships that give it definition: between parts and wholes, structure and duration, inside and outside, word and image, and prose and poetry. Melville understood literary "form" in such an array: not as a structure, a given, but as the uneasy intersection of systems in which information is shaped and conveyed and in which expectation and transgression are continually modifying one another.