Big Books of American Literature: Alchemies of Mind Day 9: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 Moby-Dick (Finale) I. Coursekeeping: revised syllabus (n.b.: the option of not writing one paper gives you both the option of
Thurs. lecture re: reader response theory 5 p.m. Fri. second set of papers due Apologies re: cost of course packet |
"Ahab's Boat Seemed Drawn Up Towards...." (This and most other images on this page
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| III. Mistake-making is centrally related to the issue I want us to look @ together today: what this book tells us--both in the story it tells and in the way it shapes the story--about how societies (schools?) are constructed, and (more importantly!) what we might do when we object to the construction in which we find ourselves participating. We had begun exploring, last week, why it was that the crew follows Ahab....doing so gives them a shared sense of purpose? enables them to avoid responsibility? |
IV. What is Melville's attitude toward the crew? Do you understand why they follow Ahab? Does comparison with our current political situation help us make sense of their behavior? |
Yet cf. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, 1953:
"It is clear...that Melville intends to make the crew
the real heroes of his book, but he is afraid of criticism...The men were entitled to revolt and to take possession of the ship themselves....The meanest mariners, renegades and castaways of Melville's day were objectively a new world. But they knew nothing...the symbolic mariners and renegades of Melville's book were isolatoes federated by one keel, but only because they had been assembled by penetrating genius....Ahab's totalitarian rule...and Ishmael was an intellectual Ahab..."
Yet. cf. again Michael Kimaid, "Bush as Ahab: Aboard the Modern Day Pequod,"Counterpunch (May 28/30, 2005)--thanks, Chris!
Leviathan, from Espace Modial |
V. So: what guidance does Melville give us, for constructing a state that is lawful and ordered? "By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State--(in Latin, civitas) which is but an artificial man." Opening sentence of Hobbes's Leviathan ("Extracts," Moby-Dick) |
VI. How might the nature of the natural world affect the sort of social order we're attempting to build? "The universe is indifferent at best, hostile at worst, to the lives of mere humans." H.P. Lovecraft |
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