According to Philbrick, Melville, in his rightly lionized novel, “Moby Dick”, challenged the form of the novel decades before James Joyce, and a century before Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. Calling for tools befitting the ambition of his task — “Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’s crater for an ink stand!” — Melville substituted dialogue and stage direction for a chapter’s worth of prose. He halted the action to include a parody of the scientific classification of whales, a treatise on the whale as represented in art, a meditation on the complexity of rope, whatever snagged his attention.
The function of the lines beginning with “Melville substituted dialogue...” is to illustrate the way in which Melville
adhered to the structure of the novel prevalent during his time
used a variety of different forms in his novel
questioned a particular genre of writing
approached writing in way different from Philbrickin
effectively subverted a conventional approach to writing
错在a particular genre of writing吧,文中并没有说是哪一种特定的流派,只说他challenged the form of novel,而novel不是一种genre。
具体什么是genre参考维基:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_genre