We’ll read & discuss Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). We’re all familiar with its place in the pantheon of American literary culture, but how well do we know the novel itself? Hitching historical realism to fantastical mythologizing, Moby-Dick festoons a plot urgent and pointed as a harpoon with coiling digressions. Melville’s maximalist sentences ring with his love of Shakespeare and Scripture, encyclopedists, natural historians, high-falutin philosophers, down-&-dirty jokesters, cultured cosmopolites and folksy fo’c’sle yarn-spinners. What will we make of this funny, tragic, Romantic, cynical, 400-page rollercoaster of a novel? Join in a spontaneous, collaborative discussion that enhances appreciation of its delights and difficulties. NOTE: The recommended edition, readily available as a used book, is the Second Norton Critical Edition, ed. Hershel Parker & Harrison Hayford, ISBN #0-393-97283-6 (ISBN-13 #978-0-393-97283-2).
About the instructor: Bob Chibka taught in the Boston College English Department 1984-2015. His publications include critical essays (mostly about 18th-Century British novels), short stories, one lonesome novel. He lives happily ever after in Brewster, where he still enjoys being pushed around by sentences & returning the favor.