Course Description
Summary
Poet Charles Olson, in his groundbreaking work of lyric criticism Call Me Ishmael (1947), argues that Melville’s classic novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is a truer and more essential literary document than Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) because “it is all of America, all of her space, the malice, the root.” A work of prophetic imagination that is almost endlessly interpretable, Moby-Dick has been read as political allegory, a Romantic depiction of the “howling infinite,” and a proto-environmentalist screed against the 19th century whaling industry and its savagery. The visual artist Ellen Gallagher (b. 1965) has referred to the novel as a work of Afrofuturism thanks to the character Pip and his fate in the chapter “The Castaway.” We’ll spend a whole term reading Melville’s account of Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the white whale that maimed him–and Ishmael’s similarly obsessive pursuit of understanding–using a wide range of criticism and commentary to help guide us through the text, including works by C.L.R. James and Toni Morrison. We will also delve into Melville’s other works, from “Bartelby the Scrivener” to Billy Budd. Students will keep a journal of their reading, collaborate on presentations, and undertake a final project involving individual, self-directed research. Communing with the book on actual paper will be required.
updated course description as of 12/15/2021
