SEMINAR PROFILE

H24 -
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Readers of Moby-Dick in Melville's lifetime were few and largely unenthusiastic. Contemporary reviewers complained of the book's bulk, its lack of plotting, and, its "blubber." Melville's masterpiece remained nearly forgotten until the 1920s when a critical generation enamored of textual "difficulty" and "ambiguity" reclaimed the book for classic American literature. Large enough to elaborate theories of the global economy and the environment, of what makes work rewarding and art popular, of friendship and leadership and the management of sailing ships, Moby-Dick is also exquisite sentence by sentence. Using our own interpretive resources, but also certain artifacts (a nineteenth-century Bible, oil lamps, whale calls), we shall try to make sense of Melville's masterpiece. (The text will be sent early in the year for obvious reasons.)

Scholar:

Elisa New

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

5/5/2009, 5/12/2009

H24 -	Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

	Readers of Moby-Dick in Melville's lifetime were few and largely unenthusiastic. Contemporary reviewers complained of the book's bulk, its lack of plotting, and, its "blubber." Melville's masterpiece remained nearly forgotten until the 1920s when a critical generation enamored of textual "difficulty" and "ambiguity" reclaimed the book for classic American literature. Large enough to elaborate theories of the global economy and the environment, of what makes work rewarding and art popular, of friendship and leadership and the management of sailing ships, Moby-Dick is also exquisite sentence by sentence. Using our own interpretive resources, but also certain artifacts (a nineteenth-century Bible, oil lamps, whale calls), we shall try to make sense of Melville's masterpiece. (The text will be sent early in the year for obvious reasons.)

		Scholar:	Elisa New
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	5/5/2009, 5/12/2009