ENGLISH 324: Moby-Dick

Course Description

Our seminar will be devoted to a slow and careful reading of Herman Melville's 1850 masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. To enhance our appreciation of the novel, we'll be reading a selection of critical, historical, ecocritical, political-theoretical, and formal studies of the novel. We'll consider its 19th-century literary-historical context in order to understand Melville's experiments with the novelistic genre in relation to his keen interest in the meaning of America and Americanness. We'll also take a look at the religious, philosophical, social, technological, commercial, and scientific issues of his day to which he alludes repeatedly throughout Moby-Dick.