Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) arguably is the Great American Novel, an encyclopedic dream of the Deep, a meditation on Everything, and the last great gasp of late dark gothic Romanticism. In its audacious reach, its erudition, its music, beauty, metaphysics, allusions, anagrams, stagings, democratic disruptions, nose-thumbings, polysemies, repetitions, puns, encryptions, inscriptions, detailed deconstructions, layerings, nestings, "careful disorderliness," circles within vortical circles, ambiguities, contradictions, bluster, fantasy, crackbrained comedy and realism, the novel was and is an outrage against mediocrity and decency, the literary marketplace's twin CEOs. Over the course of two weekends this Blockseminar will examine Melville’s “wicked book,” as he described it to Hawthorne, chapter by close chapter.
May 12 - 13
SHORT QUIZ on material from the title page through Chapter 70, as well as your edition’s critical introduction.
REFERATE selected from the following chapters or chapter groupings: Ch. 1 "Loomings"; Ch. 3 "The Spouter-Inn"; Ch. 13 "Wheelbarrow"; Ch. 26-27 "Knights and Squires"; Ch. 28-29 "Ahab" and “Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb"; Ch. 32 "Cetology"; Ch. 41 "Moby Dick"; Ch. 42 "The Whiteness of the Whale"; Ch. 54 "The Town-Ho Story"; Ch. 61 "Stubb kills a Whale"; Ch. 65 "The Whale as a Dish".
Junel 02 - 03
SHORT QUIZ on chapters 71 through “Epilogue”.
REFERATE on Ch. 78-80 "Cistern and Buckets," "The Prairie" and "The Nut"; Ch. 85 "The Fountain"; Ch. 86 "The Tail"; Ch. 87 "The Grand Armada"; Ch. 90 & 94 “Heads or Tails" and "A Squeeze of the Hand”; Ch. 99 "The Doubloon"; Ch. 104 "The Fossil Whale"; Ch. 132 "The Symphony"; Ch. 133 "The Chase - First Day"; Ch. 135 "The Chase - Third Day"; "Epilogue".
Literatur:
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale - Herman Melville One of the following three Penguin Classics editions (NOT the Penguin Popular Classic, which lacks any critical apparatus): 1992 edition edited by Andrew Delbanco, which has recently gone out of print; the new edition edited by Nathan Philbrick, which is not due to be released until April 2012; or the one from 1972 (1986, 1987) edited by Harold Beaver (if you’re lucky enough to be able to find this one). The only other acceptable edition for the course is the Oxford World’s
Classics edited by Tony Tanner. |
