Category Archives: Final Project Proposal

Final Essay Proposal

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For my final project, I will close read my sailing class. I have been taking it all semester alongside Moby Dick and I think it has been a good supplemental thing to do alongside reading this novel because it has given me some (limited) perspective as to what it’s like to be at sea, and the boredom that comes along with staring out at the water. 

Thesis: Moby Dick is filled with chapters of seemingly nothing, of boredom, of lack of action. Many consist of in depth descriptions, or abstract commentary on the ocean. Melville uses these chapters to convey the emotional state that sailors found thesmelves in on these boats, where days of boredom seem to float on by, perhaps explaining both Ishmael’s lack of self and Ahab’s madness. 

Final Essay Proposal

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For this project, I will argue that Herman Melville constructs the Pequod as a microcosm of nineteenth-century American society, a confined world where racial diversity, economic ambition, and hierarchical authority collide. Using Ishamael’s description of the ship as “a Quaker ship manned by races the most dissimilar”, this essay will show how Melville compresses the contradictions of American democracy, capitalism, and power into the ship’s tight social structure. By compressing these contradictions into the tight space of a single ship, Melville suggests that the forces shaping American life—its diversity, its capitalist motives, and its susceptibility to authoritarian power—are internal structures individuals carry with them, making the ship’s eventual destruction a symbolic warning about the nation as a whole. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how close reading can reveal the political and cultural stakes embedded in literary form, especially when texts use constrained spaces, i.e the Pequod, to model larger social dynamics. I plan to present this work as a traditional written essay. This project reflects my ongoing interest on how literature critiques systems of power and represents social complexity. 

Final Project Proposal

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In Moby Dick, Melville presents a complicated rumination on life and America in the form of a novel about whaling and the chase of a great whale. My purpose is to explore Melville’s use of circles and circle related language as he uses it in the novel, and will be writing regular 6-8 page essay on the topic. My aim is to capture the overarching message of the novel, which seems to point to the cyclical nature of existence, a reality that is both comforting and terrifying.

Thesis statement: Throughout Moby Dick, Melville makes use of the concept of circles in his diction, imagery, and as a structural aspect in the overall narrative.

Final Project Proposal

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I am nervous about it, but I am going to write Pip into The Deep by Rivers Solomon. I believe that Melville purposefully delivered Pip to his ancestors. I can’t stop thinking about the intersection of Pip’s soul lost to the Antilles and the mermaids from the Middle Passage.

Thesis:

In Chapter 110 of Moby Dick, while Queequeg is laying in his coffin preparing for death, Pip asks a favor of him. “Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think he’s in those far Antilles.” (522) By conveying Pip to the Antilles, Melville delivers him to his ancestors. This delivery directs focus to the savage, immoral foundations of America. This subtle critique not only assesses Christianity and capitalism, but delivering Pip to the Middle Passage critiques the values of ‘civility’ compared to so called savagery. Melville indicates that there is no such thing as civility, only justified savagery.

Final Project Proposal

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For my final project, I will be painting a scene of whales breastfeeding! I was inspired by chapter 87, The Grand Armada, and Professor Pressman’s article on breastfeeding to make this for my final project! I am currently almost done with the painting, I just need to add some final touches, and I could bring to to class on Thursday to show!

Along with the painting, I will be writing the paper explaining why I chose this subject in particular. I wanted to analyze the aspect of the feminine nature of the ocean and the beauty of the whales breastfeeding in this moment, as the rest of the book is filled with violence of harming these beautiful creatures for what they can get from them.

Thesis: Despite no feminine presence aboard the Pequod, the vast oceans hold some of the most beautiful feminine nature within. Seen in chapter 87, The Grand Armada, we read of a beautiful scene of sperm whales that even describes nursing whales exuding a beautiful, tender moment of a womanly presence and act, breastfeeding! Although the presence of women is sparse in this book, Melville does grace us with a motherly nature in the ocean seen by these misunderstood creatures amid the violence they commit towards the whales throughout the rest of the book.

Final Project Proposal

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For my final project proposal, I wanted to analyze the symbolism of the fossil whale, or the whale as an artifact and history, through an essay. As stated in the asynchronous peer review, I’ll discuss the implications of Ishmael’s description of the whale as an archaeological site, both as living and as dead (fossil). My focus will be on ch104: The Fossil Whale. I want to emphasize the conversations on history that are had in this book, the deconstruction of what counts as history, what gets told, and what gets tossed under the rug of time.

Thesis: Ishmael discusses the validity of the ‘American’ historical canon through the body of the whale, or “the fossil whale”. Whales have a deeper connection to the scope of American history as a continent, especially to the original hunters before colonization (the spear found in a whale). As a fossil, the whale is borderless, traversing the watery world, and leaving its print among the land, part of a momentary recession of the waterline. The whale, in this sense, dismantles the American idealism of permanence and ownership over a continent during an age of border expansion.

Final Project Proposal: The Modern Extracts

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Melville’s Extracts show that the whale in Moby-Dick is not a fixed creature but a shifting construction shaped by fragments of language, cultural myth, and human fear. By presenting knowledge as partial, contradictory, and dependent on who is doing the collecting, Melville suggests that humans understand the unknown not by encountering it directly but by stitching together stories that reflect their own anxieties and desires. This matters today because modern culture continues to define the ocean, and nature more broadly, through the same unstable patchwork of fear, fantasy, and media imagery, revealing that the struggle to interpret the unknown has not changed.

My project explores this continuity by creating a video collage that reimagines the Extracts through contemporary clips from movies, shows, songs, podcasts, and online media. The format makes visible how today’s fragments echo Melville’s nineteenth-century voices, showing that our culture still assembles meaning from scattered, conflicting sources. The accompanying essay will close read both Melville’s Extracts and the digital collage to show how this fragmented way of knowing persists.

Final Project Proposal

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The final project is on human greed in commercialization with exploitation of the carcass as a way to inadvertently dissect religion in society. Near the end of chapter 104 is the passage that will be evaluated. By deconstructing the location of the unknown place of worship, and the Diety in replacement of the whale, it is exposed that we place our faith in seen symbols, taking away the focus on the true point of worship– God, in this case– and use these symbols from a place of security, or weaponization of the religion. I found the use of demonstrating the carcass as sacrifice critical in instigating the foundation of religion as exploitive, manipulative, and cruel. Ultimately, the premise is to examine the androgynous nature of the temple and the whale in this passage, and how this becomes a social commentary on the Industrial Revolution. This paper will be an essay. 

Final project proposal

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As I’ve stated during the asynchronous peer review, my final project won’t be anything too special; it’s more-or-less going to be a reflection essay on my experience reading (close-reading) and learning from Moby-Dick; in other words, what Moby-Dick means to me. My essay will be less formal than the ones I’ve already written for this class. I could focus on the painting in chapter 3, the phrenology of the whale in chapter 79, the doubloon in Chapter 99, and/or the musket in chapter 123 and explain how Melville uses these chapters to teach the reader to read. The book acts like a guide to reading; by reading the whale, Melville makes us read other whales that he hunted for us so that we can think beyond the book and be more aware of the social issues that remain prevalent today.

The requirements for the final project are a thesis statement (which I have a draft of and am still refining), close-reading of the text (a skill we’ve developed), and an engagement with at least two scholary sources (using evidence to support our argument which we have been doing throughout our time in SDSU) with a page requirement of 6-8 pages (or 3-4 for a close-reading of your creative artwork). Since the final requires two scholarly sources, I could try to look for the ones that dive into these chapters in Moby-Dick or similarly deal with close-reading in regards to this book. I could also use Emerson’s American Scholar as one source since it also deals with reading.

Final Project Proposal

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I’ve not yet managed to reword my thesis, but the basis behind the final essay revolves around questions of how to “read.”

Thesis: Through the use of (my creative project) and a passage from chapter 79 “The Prairie”, the grand animal encapsulates the incapability of the human mind to decipher the creature. Melville utilizes the whale and its brow as a symbol of unknowingness. This then poses a criticism towards flawed sciences and a reconfiguration of philosophy.

Essentially, what I am trying to convey is the way Melville talks about the sciences and philosophies behind “reading.” We’ve come to understand that phrenology is a flawed science from this era, but in addition to that, there is also the science behind animal classification. I plan on utilizing the whole “read my brow” section within The Prairie chapter. Alongside my Halloween costume (yes I’m sure you all know the one), it made me think about the fact that we’re still actively kind of “reading” things. How do we know what a whale is, how do we assume to know what a whale thinks, does the whale’s brow mean anything to it, it’s questions like these that make it seem like Melville has something more at play despite the short chapter. The novel has a focus on the inscrutable and unreadable towards nature, and I think it makes a statement that science and philosophy is not a perfect thing. It’s flawed and still actively changing, even now. Albeit, many people still stick to the popular customs and rules of either practice because that is just the grander consensus.