Category Archives: Week 14: Thanksgiving Week—what you still need to know for your final projects

Final Proposal

Posted on by
1

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.

final thesis idea

Posted on by
1

Reading the text vs reading the messages that hide behind the lines of the text, Melville takes us through a story. As he takes us through his story, he stops us in our tracks and makes us look at figures, paintings, and markings. This is how Melville teaches us how to read within reading. These painting and figures he asks us to read teaches us how to read his book, Moby Dick. We have to look further into these markings and paintings that Melville tells us to stop and read, just as we do with text. It’s about stopping, taking a first glance, reading the marking, leaving, and coming back to re-read the same markings. Throughout the whole book, we encounter paintings, figures, and markings, such as the painting in the Spouter Inn, the right whale’s head, the sperm whale’s head, and Queequeg’s tattoos. This book is filled with nuance and long, wordy paragraphs, but then we come across something like the painting at the beginning of the book; he tells us to stop and look with Ishmael. It’s the message within the painting that gives us some answers to the nuance. The art of the lesson that Melville is teaching us is a demonstration of closing reading, to adventure beyond the text and find out why he asks us to look at the right whale’s head and why the details give us (the audience) answers to the nuance that Melville is writing.

With this thesis, I want to close read certain objects, paintings, and figures.

Starting with the painting at the beginning of the book, The Spouter Inn, then the Right Whale’s head, then Queegueg’s tattoos in relation to his coffin, and then I want to close read the markings, such as the marble tables in the chapel. I will discuss why it’s important for us to closely read these non-textual elements within the text and how they teach us to read Moby Dick.

Final Project Brainstorm

Posted on by
Reply

What you still need to learn/do for your final project

Honestly, I am not entirely sure what I want to focus on for my final project. But to throw an idea out there, I will be doing a close reading expanding more on obsession and the negative effects it has on a person while specifically focusing on Ahab. I still need to do the research though and figure out what examples I want to use. I would still like to explore other ideas for the final though. And, something I still need to learn is close reading and explaining myself more. Close reading has never been my strong suit and I still have a lot to learn.

Week 13: What’s next….

Posted on by
Reply

What do you need to do/learn for your final project?

I feel like I still need to learn more and understand a bit more about close reading certain things. I’ve been to overwhelmed with the class and by all the information that I have zero idea on what I’m going to do. I’m not much of a creative artsy type of person, so I’m just bee doing an essay. For my final project, I will be discussing about mental health, alcoholism, obsession and more into the mental health part of the chapters, I’ll mostly be focusing on Ahab, Pip and Ishmael depending on how it goes and the subject. Close reading has become such an experience to do in my life and still need practice on it too. I still need to do research and find some examples from the chapters of the book and see where this goes.

Or The Whale.

Posted on by
1

There’s much to be done before the final, researching and planning for the massive essay, one that honours the novel and perhaps even makes a reader rethink and recontextualise the novel’s events! Or so I hope. The bit that has me in its grips, that just continues to swim about my mind fluid, is how the titular Whale is not this evil creature filled with hate—no, of course not, that would be Ahab—but rather this being filled with kindness. Could it be that this creature is one of kindness, as seen with the warnings that are given before they engage with the Whale at the end of the novel? Might this creature be biblical in that from the first sin came hate and violence (Ahab)? I am completely unable to get the idea out of my head that perhaps, just maybe, the Whale can be seen as a messenger from God, much like an archangel or have a similar use in the novel as Adam does in the bible? How much of the Whale do we see reflected in the sermon whale? And the other way about? I find this Whale endlessly fascinating and I am beyond excited to work this into an actual idea worth presenting!

Final Project Thoughts

Posted on by
1

What do you still need to learn/do for your final project?
Melville’s use of circles, physical and metaphorical, in Moby Dick has caught my attention and I will explore that concept for my final project. I have interpreted this shape to be Melville’s discussion of infinity and Eternity, and endless cycles that make up life. For my project, I would like to dive deeper into this concept and find out what is the bigger purpose of it in the narrative and what does it tell us about the overall message of the book. What does Eternity represent for Melville? Should we as readers find the idea comforting, terrifying, or both? Is the point to be nihilistic or optimistic? All important questions for me to consider. In my case, I need to scan the book to find examples of this concept and contrast them with each other on how they are being used and for what. Compiling excerpts will give me a better idea of the kind of argument they make and the argument I will be making. I also need to do more research for the reference part of our project, so I am excited to dive back into our reading list and beyond and let my project take shape from there. Finally, once I have my argument (or while forming it) I’ll decide if it suits me better to do a long essay or choose a creative medium with a short essay. Both ideas sound doable for what I will be talking about, but I’ll give myself more time to decide the medium.

wk 14: A work in progress…

Posted on by
1

I want to extend my discussion of fossils, and the fossil whale, or the whale as an artifact and history, through an essay. To do this I wanted to incorporate other mentions of the whale as an archeological site, besides my original focus on ch104: The fossil whale. I want to emphasize the conversations on history that are had in this book, which requires some deep diving and recalling throughout the scope of this book. The reason I wanted to focus on this topic is because,, as a lover of history, I was drawn to the deconstruction of what counts as history, what gets told and what gets tossed under the rug of time. 

Thesis under construction: 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 it’s print among the land, part of a momentary recession of the waterline. The whale, in this sense, dismantles the American canon of permanence and ownership over a continent during an age of border expansion.

This is a very early version of my thesis, as you can see, I’m still very caught between the fossil v history, and the fossil v borders/maps. 

Week 13

Posted on by
1

I want to explore the quote “A whaleship was my Yale college and my Harvard” along with the character of the pale usher. I feel very strongly that Melville puts so much effort into teaching the reader how to read because it’s also how we learn to read the world but he is also stressing that the reader should not assume that all knowledge is to be found in books, through words that someone else has written. It is also important to have a strong connection to the natural world around us. The train of thought needs to be fleshed out more but I do want to find scholarly articles about transcendentalism to tie into my essay.

Final

Posted on by
1

For my final essay, I’m not 100% sure I will write about this but one thing has been on my mind throughout the semester is the fact that the boat was referred to as a woman and why that matters/ is important. When the story mostly consists of men, the most important “woman” is the boat aka the foundation for them whale men. My thoughts on this are all over the place at the moment and pretty messy so I need to focus on what I’m trying to say about this.

Week 14

Posted on by
1

What you still need to learn/do for your final project

Where do I even start?

I haven’t done this much close reading in a long while, and my skills are still a bit rusty. Sometimes when it comes to writing essays, my brain will come up with words I want to type out, but it falls flat when I actually have to type them out. I’m still not really good at close reading or analyzing a passage since I usually default to just summarizing it instead of actually reading and coming up with interpretations for it. I’m also not good at explaining why a particular passage is relevant since I’m kind of out of touch with current events, which makes it hard for me to explain a passage’s significance if I’m not well-informed in the subject that I want to talk about. I also have to reread some of the “important” passages that we did/didn’t go over in class, since this semester went by so fast that I couldn’t find enough time to read the book.

So yeah, I still have a lot to learn. That being said, I’m exhausted from reading this whale of a book, and I can safely say that we all deserve a break for finishing this behemoth. You all have read the book, and you have read the whale. Enjoy your Thanksgiving.