I am proposing an essay analyzing how Melville’s Moby Dick is in conversation with Emersons transcendentalist American Scholar. I believe that Melville intends to use his novel to teach us how to be analytical readers and he does so through the character of Ishmael whilst at the same time showing us his polar opposite through Captain Ahab. I am not entirely sure what second scholarly source will be but I am reading through some journals touching on the topics of the pedagogy of the book, art as a way to stimulate creation of the mind, and classification of animal intelligence compared to human intelligence. I am citing below the articles I am currently looking through.
Swails, Elizabeth Heinz. “Melville’s Thinking Animal and the Classification Conundrum.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, vol. 66 no. 2, 2020, p. 325-363. Project MUSE
Assif, Adeena. “”The Dialogue of the Mind with Itself”: Freud, Cavell, and Company.” Common Knowledge, vol. 26 no. 1, 2020, p. 12-38. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/749019.
Ross, M. L. (1974). Moby-Dick as an Education. Studies in the Novel, 6, 62–75.
I think this is a good topic, and I would go check out Alyssa G’s blog, as she is also working on this topic. I think you still need to develop an argument about what reading the novel in relationship to Emerson’s lecture teaches or tells us. Your primary point is, “to teach us how to be analytical readers and he does so through the character of Ishmael whilst at the same time showing us his polar opposite through Captain Ahab”– this is good. We have two models for thinking. Yet, how does Emerson come into play here, or do you need him?
I don’t think that the sources you have listed are those that are most helpful–I would instead return to reread Emerson and the introduction to our edition by Andrew DelBlanco.
Keep going, this is good thinking!