In contemporary literary discussions, Moby-Dick occupies the status of quintessential American literature. Yet during Herman Melville's lifetime, this "evil book," as Melville himself described it in correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne, achieved minimal commercial success. The novel subsequently disappeared from public consciousness along with Melville's reputation, remaining largely forgotten until twentieth-century scholars and readers rediscovered it and elevated it to canonical status as an overlooked masterpiece. Superficially, the narrative recounts an obsessive sea captain's quest for vengeance against Moby Dick, a massive white whale; however, the novel's scope extends far beyond this central plot.
This encyclopedic work synthesizes examination of numerous interconnected themes including obsessive behavior, ethical inquiry, epistemology, the relationship between chaos and divine design, the nature of individual identity and social organization, national belonging, racial identity and heritage, slavery and abolition movements, masculine power and sexuality, labor systems and military conflict, nineteenth-century popular expression, justice and injustice, ecological systems and zoological science, literary genealogy, aesthetic standards, and the ultimate limits of language and representation. The work oscillates between adventure narrative, philosophical inquiry, and scientific treatise; it is a text of overwhelming multiplicity and deliberate provocation. The historian C.L.R. James, writing while imprisoned by immigration authorities on Ellis Island, observed that "the whale and whaling become the connecting thread upon which hangs a sequence of historical and cultural scenes of the world . . . [Melville] aims to encompass everything within his book." How does one begin to interpret a novel that attempts to contain the totality of human experience?
Our investigation of Melville's white whale deliberately resists reducing the novel to a singular moral lesson, unified theme, or fixed symbolic meaning. Rather, we approach the text from the conviction that multiplicities and ambiguities in meaning, available to different readers and generations, are central to the novel's narrative strategy and its continuing cultural resonance. The poet Charles Olson characterized Melville's achievement by saying that "it is America, all of her geography, her aggression, her foundation." Even this expansive characterization may ultimately prove insufficiently comprehensive. Beyond Melville's own writings and works by his contemporaries including Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karl Marx, and Walt Whitman, this seminar will examine texts that comprise Moby-Dick's critical and literary legacy, likely encompassing scholarly and creative responses by Lawrence Buell, E.M. Forster, Judith Goldman, D.H. Lawrence, C.L.R. James, Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Raymond Weaver, and others.
