Moby-Dick: Reading the White Whale

Today, Moby-Dick holds the status of the quintessential American novel. During Herman Melville's own lifetime, however, this work, which Melville himself described as a "wicked book" in correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne, initially failed to attract a popular audience. The novel subsequently disappeared from literary consciousness along with Melville's reputation, only to be rediscovered and reestablished as a neglected masterwork by twentieth-century literary scholars and readers. While nominally recounting a sea captain's obsessive quest for vengeance against the great white whale, this encyclopedic text weaves together a bewildering range of themes and inquiries: obsession and personal fixation, ethical considerations, the nature of human knowledge, randomness and cosmic design, the constitution of individual identity and social organization, national identity and destiny, racialization and slavery abolition, gender and sexual orientation, labor practices and armed conflict, nineteenth-century cultural production, justice and injustice, environmental concerns and animal biology, particularly cetology (the study of whales and their characteristics), literary traditions and history, aesthetic considerations, and the boundaries of what can be represented in language. Blending maritime adventure, philosophical exploration, and scientific dissertation, Moby-Dick presents a text of overwhelming and bewildering abundance. The historian C.L.R. James observed in a work composed while detained by federal immigration authorities that "the whale and whaling become a thread connecting the history of civilization itself. Melville sought to encompass everything within his narrative." Where does one begin with a novel aspiring to contain the entirety of human experience?

Our examination of the white whale resists the impulse to collapse Moby-Dick into a single unified interpretation, theme, or symbolic meaning. Rather, we start from the understanding that indeterminacy and interpretive multiplicity, the capacity for readers to construct varied meanings from both the novel itself and the whale, lies at the center of how the text demands to be understood, how it achieved historical significance, and how it continues to matter in contemporary discourse. The poet Charles Olson wrote of Melville's masterpiece that "it embodies America itself, encompassing its vast territory, its contradictions and malice." Even this expansive claim may ultimately prove too restrictive. Alongside supplementary writings by Melville and his contemporaries, including Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karl Marx, and Walt Whitman, this course explores selections from the rich critical and creative responses to Moby-Dick. These materials likely include scholarly work by Lawrence Buell, E.M. Forster, Judith Goldman, David Herbert Lawrence, C.L.R. James, Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Raymond Weaver, and other significant interpreters.