Category Archives: Uncategorized

An Etymology blog for the Novel Moby-Dick

Posted on by
2

When Herman Melville titled his novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, the curious spelling and hyphenation immediately invited readers to pause and wonder. The name “Moby” is believed to derive from the adjective mobile or mighty, hinting at both the whale’s vast size and elusive movement through the sea. The “Dick” portion comes from the old-fashioned practice of giving familiar names to animals or objects, much like “Tom” or “Jack.” Melville even drew inspiration from real-life accounts of a massive white whale called “Mocha Dick,” a notorious creature encountered near Chile in the early 19th century. By reshaping the name, Melville transformed a real legend into a symbolic force of nature. The title itself, therefore, blends history, folklore, and creative invention, anchoring the whale in both myth and reality.

Delbanco’s Introduction

Posted on by
1

My focus was drawn towards Delbanco’s claim that Moby Dick has a distinctively American accent because it is predicated on the shared belief between thinkers that America needed to stop looking towards Europe and the past in order to forge a uniquely American path. It seems to me that the founding of this American story as we understand it now also necessitated the erasure of the history of the Indigenous peoples of the land in order to create its self-made facade. I am interested to consider how the text explores this subject. While I understand how radically new this form of thinking was in its time, now in hind sight it feels like this same American story is also now being weaponized against anyone that does not fit the constructed idea of the ‘American’ persona. It fundamentally misunderstands and erases the multiculturalism that built this country.

Blue Humanities according to Mentz

Posted on by
1

Reading Steve Mentz’s “A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities after John Gillis”made me realize how rarely I think about water beyond the obvious. I know the ocean as something to swim in, lakes as places to relax, and rain as an inconvenience or blessing depending on the day. But Mentz pushes me to see water as a living, shifting presence that’s woven into everything. It’s unsettling but also kind of thrilling to imagine myself as part of this system of liquid, vapor, and ice.

What really stayed with me was his turn to poetry, especially Dickinson’s “An everywhere of silver” and Whitman’s surf-soaked embrace of the sea. Dickinson captures that fragile boundary where sand tries, and fails, to hold back the water. I’ve stood on beaches watching waves erase my footprints in seconds, and her words made me feel that same vulnerability. Whitman, by contrast, dives right in, almost seduced by the water. That image of surrendering to the sea made me think of my own swims—the way the first plunge into cold water shocks my body awake, and how quickly that shock turns into exhilaration. Mentz is right: poetry often describes that complicated mix of awe and danger better than science ever could.

Still, I felt a tension in the essay. The focus on poetry and philosophy sometimes floats above the material reality of water crises today. Rising seas aren’t just metaphors—they’re swallowing coastlines, displacing families, and reshaping entire communities. I wished Mentz had pulled more of those lived human struggles into the frame alongside Dickinson and Whitman. For me, the blue humanities feels most powerful when it connects personal experience, art, and the very real politics of climate change.

Even so, I walked away from this essay with a new sense of how water refuses to stay in one form, one place, or one meaning. That fluidity—sometimes comforting, sometimes terrifying—seems like the best way to think about our current moment. If poetry can help us sit with that instability, then maybe it can also help us imagine how to endure it.

Melville and Tone Within “Moby Dick”

Posted on by
1

Within the introduction to Moby Dick, Deblanco calls the novel “A noisy book written in a braggart’s voice”. And, according to Google, a braggart is “a person who boasts about achievements or possessions”, which, I can assume from this quote, is a character trait of our protagonist Ishmael.

As a reader who has read 287 books (and counting) I absolutely LOVE when you can learn things about characters from the author’s writing. Or rather, when the author doesn’t TELL us what a character’s traits are, but shows us through their actions, thoughts, and most importantly, their writing. While this is most prevalent in books that switch point of views, it makes be excited to read the rest of this book.

In particular I notice this most within books that talk about race, glass, and generational gaps. Authors use words that fit the character, rather than words that might make the novel more understandable fir the reader. And it really engages me, as a reader. I want to feel immersed into the world. And, ultimately, it doesn’t make sense for a 75 year old to use Gen Z slang terms, or for a British character to use the word “trunk” for the back compartment of a car, rather than “boot”. And, hopefully we see this with Melville in the novel within the dialogue of characters, and everything in between. From the descriptions and outside perspectives we have read in class, I assume that this will happen, as we learn, in depth, about what it was like to be on a Whaling ship. After all, if an Alien could recreate whaling from this book, it must be very, very in depth, (and as someone who had read the novel in previous years, I can confirm that it indeed, does).

On the very first page of the Introduction, “Moby Dick” is called “the greatest English novel”. And, to be called that, it must have inspired countless authors. And even in other completely unrelated genres, sometimes I see authors who have clearly been inspired by Melville, using their words to show us character traits of both the point of view character, and the world.

Moby-Dick

Posted on by
1

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is more than just a story about a whale-it’s a meditation on obsession, fate and the vastness of vastness of nature. The narrator, Ishmael, takes readers on a perilous voyage aboard the Pequod, where Captain Ahab’s relentless pursuit of the white whale consumes the crew. Through detailed descriptions of the sea, whaling life, and philosophical reflections, Melville blends adventure with deep symbolism. The white whale itself becomes a powerful emblem of mystery, resistance, and the unknown forces beyond human control. Reading Moby-Dick is both a thrilling narrative and a challenge to reflect on humanity’s place in the universe.

Imagine a dark ocean horizon where the Pequod sails forward under stormy skies, its sails strained against the wind. Captain Ahab stands on deck, gripping his whalebone leg and pointing his harpoon toward the turbulent waves. Below, the crew works tirelessly, their faces tense, reflecting both fear and loyalty. Suddenly, the massive white from of Moby Dick breaches the surface, scattering water like shattered glass. This dramatic clash of man and nature captures the epic struggle that defines the heart of the novel.

(OPTIONAL POST, CAN SKIP) September 11 class comment- oh no it became an essay.

Posted on by
1

I was going to bring this up in class, but it’s a bit long, so I decided to make a post about it here with the professor’s permission. There were two interesting topics I wanted to cover: pirates and art. For those who are interested in playing the following games, there’s spoilers ahead: Persona 5 (and P5 Royal) and Detroit: Become Human. This doesn’t count towards the grade, it’s just me wanting to ramble about some things.

Pirates are one of the many dangers of the seas, but interestingly they’re not from them. An amazing point was brought up in class that pirates essentially practiced diversity long before everyone else followed, as a sort of rebellious act against the laws that wrong them. I’ve played Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and the game showed how different the pirates were compared to politicians, religious groups, and other society members. Okay, but what does that have to do with this class? There’s a minigame I love and hate at the same time and it’s harpooning. One of the animals you can hunt are whales, which are the most difficult animals to get materials from. In fact, it’s because of this experience that my curiosity of Moby Dick increased. If it’s already so difficult to hunt regular whales (based on how the player character was behaving), Moby Dick, or Mocha Dick, must have been more than twice perilous.

“Life imitates art more than art imitates life.” The first few references I thought of were Persona 5, Detroit: Become Human, and Dead By Daylight’s “The Artist.” These don’t relate to Moby Dick or whales at all, but I wanted to share how I saw this quote in three different video games.

Persona 5 had a segment about the morals of artists as a conflict. One of the characters, Yusuke, had ambitious goals, but he was exploited by a famous artist known as Madarame, who only saw art as profit. Madarame in-game was known to be the greatest artist at the time. But this was a lie: when Yusuke opened his eyes to the truth, he said Madarame “knew nothing about art.” Madarame stole countless people’s works and depleted their artistic drives. He showed their efforts in a museum, claiming all of it was drawn by himself. The biggest plot device of interest was the painting of Yusuke’s mother, who had died before Yusuke could remember her face. Madarame not only used Yusuke’s artworks, but even tampered with his mother’s painting before releasing it for the world to see. It was about herself holding a baby, her son Yusuke. But Madarame erased the baby from the painting, making the woman’s expression mysterious. As an artist (writer) myself, I could see myself in Yusuke as a little boy who was afraid of trusting anyone with my creations. How this relates to the aforementioned quote: it’s the content in the paintings. Yusuke once drew one that depicted a dark abyss and an eye in the middle. It symbolized his despair under Madarame’s mentorship, how it hurt to see people think his efforts were orchestrated by someone else. These two paintings effectively show that art is another way to show life.

One of Detroit: Become Human’s first chapters started with an android named Markus. He worked under an artist named Carl Manfred, but unlike Madarame, Manfred was a kind soul who taught Markus how to be a human, and art was one of those mediums. When Manfred asked Markus to paint, he said “painting is not about replicating the world. It’s about interpreting it, improving on it, showing something you see.” The player then chooses two sets of themes, and Markus draws a painting based on what the player chose. In all of these paintings, Markus showed artistic skill, but the content of the paintings themselves depict emotions, as if life itself finally had tangible meaning.

Finally, a character from Dead By Daylight known as the Artist, real name Carmina Mora, is a tragic heroine who used her experiences for black-in surrealist art. She also exposed a corrupt company by painting a mural, depicting them as a grim reaper “harvesting the fields of Chilean families.” This also slightly reflect Yusuke’s story, as both wanted to escape and expose the people who exploit others for personal gain. It represents the quote because the lives they lived were represented in art, which encapsulates the meaning.

Blog Response – “A Poetics of Planetary Water” by Steve Mentz

Posted on by
2

Steve Mentz constantly discusses the means of changing our relationship with the water in our environment. For centuries, the ocean and large bodies of water have been viewed as something to conquer, to possess, and something that can be transformed into a border or a place of recreation. This type of mindset revolves around issues of colonization, laying claim to or being placed in a position above something that cannot be “owned”. Melville refers to this as the “masterless ocean”, as Mentz references in his writing, something that humans “depend upon [it] and love [it], but it cannot be our home” (p. 4). It seems pointless to lay claim to something that is ever-changing and thus cannot be tamed. The ocean is something almost alien, especially considering that we know so little about it. To lay claim to the very thing that we cannot defeat or confine shows our complete lack of understanding of what the ocean truly stands for. Mentz urges us through the study of blue humanities to learn more about the ocean because “we are going to be seeing more of it, closer up, in the future” (p. 8) Not only in the rising sea levels of the unexplored ocean, but in the heavier rainstorms that risk flooding our neighborhoods with the ever-growing draught of our planet, we risk succumbing to the extremes of the water that we consider having rights over. The very thing we own, without proper knowledge or understanding of, will ultimately kill us all.

Week 3: Reclamation of the Blue Humanities

Posted on by
2

From reading both articles, I now understand that Moby Dick is an extensive novel that exposes human greed. In other words, we categorize and label experiences based on our implicit biases and pride, whether we like to accept this factual statement or not. I feel that there is a working between outside events and subjective intake that has plagued the working class of the 19th century, because we cannot accept ideologies apart from Western ideology or societal principle.

The Blue Humanities article talks about how the symbolic features of the sea can be inadvertently used to justify uplifted status in the terrestrial land. ” It became a symbol of eternity, a comfort to those who, having lost their faith in divine dispensation of everlasting life, came to see in its apparently timeless flows evidence of nature’s immortality and a secular promise of life everlasting.(Gillis)” While this is indicative that there is co-existence that is present with the sea, the symbol of nature and the sea as “transcendent” bleeds into the human supremacy of the privileged groups on land. In a way, this metaphor for life and living becomes a danger for those unprivileged and marginalized groups in land. Consequentially, I think that Melville uses Moby Dick to call out the symbol within the Industrial Age.

On the contrary, the symbol of the sea works to articulate the invisible power of marginalized communities during the Industrial age, and gives a platform for those voices. Even though the experimental novel works to examine the romantic senses that is excessively capitalized in the Industrial Age, its spiritual symbol is so authentic to human culture, surpassing elite status or upper class society within the terrestrial land hierarchy. For example, the symbol is reflective of our behavior and brings back the sentiment of human contentedness and hope when comparing our labor to the immense infrastructure of the sea and what we don’t know.

“The Blue Humanities” and the Curious Nature of the Ocean

Posted on by
1

Within the article, “The Blue Humanities” by John R. Gillis, alludes to the teachings of Emerson. Gillis writes, “[T]he desire for an experience of untamed nature originated in the eighteenth century among a small group of European aesthetes, for whom the awesome power of the sea, as witnessed from the safety of land, was a powerful emotional and mental stimulant”. It truly made me realize that oceanic research is so new to humans and the level of knowledge during the era of whaling. The newfound exploration of the nature of the ocean “became a fountain of images and metaphors” with the emergence of oceanic writings such as Moby-Dick. With Melville spending time at sea and having knowledge of the ocean, he used the ocean as a metaphor. What that metaphor is, is yet to come with my reading of the book. He allows the average person, who has no ocean knowledge, to immerse themselves into the curious nature of the deep undiscovered ocean.

Melville was a genius (and maybe a time traveler)

Posted on by
2

After reading the article, “What ‘Moby-Dick’ Means to Me” by Philip Hoare, I’m convinced that Herman Melville was a genius who was way ahead of his time (which is why he could also be a time traveler). This article really gave me great insight into the novel and Melville himself, and learning of the influence that the novel has far after Melville passed away shows that his work has clearly reached across many different generations. It was fascinating to learn that a prow had to be built on the pulpit in the New Bedford Bethel because of how many people were expecting it to be there after reading Moby-Dick. The amount of detail that is contained within the novel is also something I’ve heard so much about, both in this article and in class, and it really shows how much effort Melville put into his piece of art.

In the article, Hoare writes, “To my mind, there are only two other works with which it bears comparison: Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (1818), and Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1847). The former, in its own witness to one man’s obsessive interference with nature, was a direct influence on Melville.” Obsession with nature and the idea of conquering it has been and always will be in human nature. I’m sure Melville’s own experiences bled through the novel, and there’s no doubt that his work in a way served somewhat as a response to his journeys on the sea.

I think what fascinated me most in this article, was learning about how Moby-Dick wasn’t truly appreciated until decades after Melville’s death. “In 1923, D. H. Lawrence published his idiosyncratic, if not faintly crazy, ‘Studies in Classic American Literature.’ Lawrence proclaimed Melville to be ‘a futurist long before futurism found paint,’ the author of “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.” The words “a futurist long before futurism found paint,” really stick out to me as it shows how Melville was able to write a novel whose words can be reached long after it’s publishing year. To learn about his genius and his ability to create work that can be appreciated for over a century, as well as seeing themes of his novel still being prevalent in the modern world, really excites me to begin reading Moby-Dick.