Courses

Though Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is now often hailed as the great American novel, upon its publication in 1851 it was greeted with disappointment and even disdain. In this course, we will devote ourselves to an in-depth study of the book that proved to be Melville’s most significant legacy in fiction. Our aims will be twofold: first, to delve into the intricacies of Moby-Dick through a close reading of this single text over the span of five weeks; and second, to explore the novel’s role in American literary history, including its continued appeal to readers and its importance in contemporary American culture. To that end, lectures will provide rich historical context about Melville’s time, as well as about the cultural, political, and racial concerns that help account for Moby-Dick’s importance in our own time. By the end of the course, students will have gained key historical and formal contexts for framing their reading of Moby-Dick, and will be able to firmly situate their own 21st-century experiences of the novel within these contexts.