Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Advanced seminar in American literature. May be organized by author, genre, period, or critical approach. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Moby-Dick

When Herman Melville published Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in 1851, readers were equal parts spellbound and confused. “There is much that is incredible and a little that is incomprehensible,” said one reviewer, reflecting the general tenor of opinion. Having fallen in love with the action-packed, lurid sea tales Melville published earlier in his career, readers wondered if he’d gone and drowned in metaphysics.

While Moby-Dick wasn’t as poorly received as legend has it, it definitely sank into obscurity quickly. It remained there for half a century, until a Canadian professor teaching at Dalhousie helped bring it back into the light. Then, practically overnight, it shot up, becoming the apotheosis of literature in the time it takes to say “Call me Ishmael.”

It would seem fitting that a prof helped bring Moby-Dick up from the depths, because people like to say it’s lit profs who keep it on the surface. Not really. The novel is seldom taught in its entirety. Instead, it’s scientists and science fiction writers, programmers and philosophers, musicians and mathematicians who read it and keep it in the public eye. Why? Why does this iconoclastic novel that's one-quarter plot and three-quarters who knows what continue to mesmerize people well beyond academia?

We’re gonna do a deep dive into Moby-Dick, and then we’re gonna swim around in the conversations and art it’s inspired, including comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz’s beloved 1990 version (link spoiler alert). Meanwhile, we’ll bookend Moby-Dick with two other Melville works: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), one of those lurid adventure tales referred to above, and The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles (1854), a creepy account of the Galápagos Islands that anticipates concerns central to ecocriticism and posthumanism right now. In addition to using those critical frameworks, we’ll also draw on book history, anti-/postcolonialism, and postsecularism to inform our discussions of all three books. Melville was well versed in each of these ways of thinking, even if they hadn’t yet coalesced into -isms.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Our goals in this course are to help you (1) better comprehend the mechanics of language, especially figurative language; (2) more effectively parse complex relationships between text and context; (3) attain knowledge of nineteenth-century American literature and our understandings of it; (4) learn skills for summarizing, synthesizing, and responding to the claims of others; (5) refine your directed and independent research skills; and (6) fine-tune your ability to design and execute cogent arguments advancing informed claims about language and literary cultures, their expression, and their contexts.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Beyond the critical/theoretical works—which will be freely available online via SFU Library or Canvas—you’ll need four texts for this course: Melville’s Moby-Dick, Typee, and The Encantadas; and They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Here’s a bit more detail.

Any unabridged edition of Moby-Dick will do. I recommend going to your favorite local bookstore and finding the one that feels good in your hand and right to your eye. Since we’ll be talking a lot about cover art and fonts and haptics and all that book history stuff, the more editions in the room the better—it’s fun and instructive to compare the different ways the novel’s packaged. (On bended knee, I ask that you consider reading Moby-Dick in print.)

There are lots of editions of Typee as well, though most aren’t in print anymore. The in-print edition most people get these days is the Penguin; yeah, it’s from 1998 but it’s perfectly serviceable. If you plan on using an online public domain version, make sure it’s not based on the first American edition, because it was censored (the publisher excised the sexy parts). The first British and subsequent American editions are all fine.

Unlike Typee and especially unlike Moby-Dick, there aren’t many editions of The Encantadas floating around, probably because it’s rarely published by itself. Instead, it’s usually packaged with other shorter works under the title The Piazza Tales, so look for that. Broadview has an excellent recent edition of The Piazza Tales; it’s the version I’ll be using. (The Piazza Tales also contains “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which is handy, because we might do an optional reading group on that deservedly famous short story.)

Finally, we’ll use Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say / I Say to talk about argumentation. While I’ll be using the 5th edition, the 3rd or 4th edition is fine, too. All are published by Norton.

If you have any questions about editions, don’t hesitate to email me.

REQUIRED READING NOTES: