American Novel (371-0-20)

Topic

The Big Book: Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'

Instructors

Jay Grossman

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 212: Mon, Wed 12:30PM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

How do we gauge and engage with a narrative of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition? How do we lose--or find--our place in a colossal fictional world? One can find only a few examples in world literature of bigger, more capacious, more ambitious books than Moby-Dick. In the first place, of course, the book is long, and part of our work will be to consider the specific pleasures and challenges of reading A Big Book. But Moby-Dick is also big in another sense: it has proven to be a hugely influential and profoundly consequential novel. Indeed, one cannot really understand U.S. literary, cultural, and political history if one has not come to terms with its story and the issues it engages. Our work will be, like Captain Ahab, to take on Melville's Leviathan better to understand the worlds the novel has helped to shape—including, by no means incidentally, our own. Among the topics that the novel addresses that are on the table for discussion and for exploration in a paper or a project: political and democratic theory; race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism; slavery in the United States; extractive capitalism and ecocriticism; intertextuality, book history, and source studies; queer theory and the history of sexuality; neurodivergence and disability studies; and adaptation across media, including film and opera.

Teaching Method

Discussion.

Evaluation Method

Regular attendance, Energized participation, Weekly quizzes, Midterm paper, Final paper or project.

Class Materials (Required)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. (Norton 3rd edition; ISBN: 9780393285000). Everyone MUST read this edition. Other readings on Canvas.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration -- Reserved for English and Creative Writing students.