For my final project, I will connect Melville’s Moby Dick to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar” by exploring their call-and-response relationship through a creative poem that incorporates direct quotes from both sources. The form and structure of the poem will represent the relationship between Emerson’s call and Melville’s response, making my project both a textual and visual answer to the final project prompt. Though the messages braided into Melville’s text stand individually as institutional critiques, it is through the novel’s perspective as an answer to a larger call for American national identity that Moby Dick clicks into place. By revisiting and reordering both Emerson’s “American Scholar” and Melville’s Moby Dick, the relationship between the two becomes poetry in its own right, an ebb and flow of the American Renaissance, and a historical preservation of exemplary American identity.
Moby-Dick
ECL 522: Fall 2025. Professor Pressman
I love this idea, both for a poem and a final project reflection about reframing our reading based upon a text read before we started reading the novel. I want to remind you that it is my interpretation that the novel is a response to Emerson; Melville doesn’t actually say that… so you need to present that as an argument or interpretation rather than a fact. In other words, you need to do the work to explain how the novel is responding and why seeing the novel as a response matters. That will be your job in the project, wherever you choose to put that content– poem or essay. I also invite you to do research to explain what you describe, nicely, as the ” ebb and flow of the American Renaissance.” But, this sounds great, and I am eager to see what you do!