Category Archives: Week 3: Prefatory and Framing–Hoare and Gillis

“Blue Humanities” and Modern Day Obsession with the Ocean

Posted on by
2

This week while reading “The Blue Humanities”, this particular tidbit stood out to me: “A shift in attention from land to sea is under way in several fields simultaneously.” The piece goes on to explain how differing scientific fields have now shifted to an oceanic point of view, this quotation in particular got me thinking about how the ocean and all it offers, both real and imagined, are portrayed in popular culture.

Now, I’m going to be honest here. I grew up without cable, so I didn’t grow up with many popular “oceanic” tv shows, except for shows that talked about all kinds of animals, such as “Wild Kratts”. But in middle school, I began to have an obsession over mermaids. I was always binging “H2O” and “Mako Mermaids”, not to mention reading books with mermaids at the forefront, such as “Siren” by Kira Cass. And, as I look back at my pre-teen self, I realized how I romanticized the creatures. Because, in reality, the mythology behind them is so much more interesting than the “dumbed down” version of them in popular culture. Am I saying that these pieces are bad? Not by any means! But they do not portray mermaids at their core. Classically speaking, mermaids lured sailors to their deaths. And, while these pieces do portray mermaids as having extraordinary singing ability, they don’t portray the true deadliness of that power. (Which does make sense, as most of these are for kids. And who wants their child to watch sailors drown?)

That’s why nowadays I am more drawn into media that portrays mermaids more like the “monster” they are in old mythology, such as in ” Into the Drowning Deep” by Mira Grant. When you really get more in depth on the creatures, I find said media to be much more interesting, and feel much more real.

But it’s not only mermaids that have become main stream pop culture, but marine veterinarians as well. My best friend growing up’s favorite movie was “Dolphin Tale”. And now she’s studying to become a Wildlife Vet! This pop culture phenomenon is inspiring thousands of people to take an interest in oceans. While the more “dumbed-down” versions of ocean mythology are what have gained popularity, at least in main stream media, they have and will inspire future scientists and artists.

“Blackfish” also comes to mind. A group of activists fighting for the Ocean animals within the Sea World parks to be released into the wild, or, at the very least, gain better living conditions. We now value ocean life more than ever!

And what’s even more amazing is how the re-emergence of “Moby Dick” really started all of it! Scholars critiquing the whaling industry took center stage, pointing out it’s brutality. Because the process is described so in depth within the novel, we, as readers, are able to truly understand it. It shows how far we have come with how we treat our sea-faring friends, both within the real world, and with how we portray them within the pages of a book.

The Blue Humanities – John R. Gillis

Posted on by
2

I think what I connected to the most in John R. Gillis’ article The Blue Humanities, was his understanding of the way in which we as people get curious. It seems to almost be in human nature to want to understand what is unknown. We have always put our dreams into the vast unexplored spaces of the universe, i.e. space, unexplored land, etc, and the ocean is not an exception to that. The quote “Dreams and nightmares that had previously been projected on terrestrial landscapes were now invested in seascapes. Even as the oceans became an object of science, they produced new myths.” is one that I think reflects this perfectly. As we explore the sea more and more, it just becomes more apparent that there is so much of it that will potentially not even be explored in our lifetime, and this is what intrigues people. The unknown world that exists simultaneously with us creates an endless desire to understand it within people because it allows us to imagine what could possibly be living among us. It’s different from just reading a fairytale or fantasy book, this is stuff that could possibly be real and the less we know the more we want to. I think this concept also resonates with and connects to what Emerson was saying in his speech about going out and exploring nature in order to learn. The desire to understand the world around us and create ideas of what might be in the world around us allows us to become more independent thinkers. This allows our brains to be stimulated in a completely different way than just reading and understanding someone else’s point of view.

The Greatest American Novel

Posted on by
1

In his article “The Blue Humanities” John R Gillis informs us that the blue humanities are a “belated recognition of the close relationship between modern western culture and the sea.” The seascape is nothing more than a backdrop until the nineteenth century. Gillis notes that one of the first novels representing the sea in more than just a utilitarian concept is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. According to Gillis the “metaphysical sophistication” of the novel is what sets it apart. But it is more than just Melville’s allusions of pelagic grandeur that buoys Moby Dick into the blue humanities. It is the centric of whaling. Whaling is humanity’s first glimpse, our first attempt, at conceptualizing oceanography. It sounds like a paradox. Whaling, this egregious act against one of nature’s most majestic oceanic creatures. But, considering Gillis’ assertion of early ocean explorers that “Oceans were explored as a means to reach distant lands, little attention was paid to the waters themselves… they used the sea merely as a highway to get to the next landfall.” One can say whalers were the first voyagers who sought what was within the ocean instead of what was across it. Whaling expeditions that extended years only relied on land as a means to resupply their ships. The ocean became the anchor for whalers, their constant. And knowing these whales, their migration patterns, their feeding grounds, their habits, was arguably humanity’s first dive into marine biology. Specifically, the Nantucket whaling industry, where the Pequod hails from. In 1712 the first documented kill of a sperm whale occurred at the hands of Nantucketer Christopher Hussey. Thus launching an industry of deep-ocean whaling specialized in Nantucket.* The same time Americans began to cast their war upon sperm whales, Europeans were shifting “terror and awe religious folk held for the supernatural to nature itself”. Reshaping the Enlightenment era into the emergence of Romanticism. Gillis mentions a 1712 anecdote by Joseph Addison: “Of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects imagination so much as the sea or ocean.” Americans were conquering some of the most fearsome creatures in the world’s most fearsome environment. The centric of whaling not only gives Moby Dick a place in blue humanities, but it hoists it up as America’s greatest novel, honoring the culture and heroes of America’s first past time.

* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/whaling-history-whaling-america/

Fish sticks? Moby Dick is gay whale

Posted on by
Reply

While reading “What Moby Dick Means to Me,” I started asking the same question. For some reason or another, millions of people around the world have heard the title of Moby Dick, and most claim, Oh yeah, I know what that’s about. Even my 8-year-old niece has heard about Moby Dick, but why? Why is this novel a pop culture icon and a household name in literature, yet most people have yet to read it?


“American high-school students are subjected to Melville’s madness, with its subversion and, to modern eyes, overtly homoerotic passages.” (Hoare) What Hoare is stating is absolutely true; Moby Dick is often considered a high school read, where teens are forced to read an 800-page book that, in my opinion, is more suited for college-level readers. I mean, I’m currently enrolled in a class dedicated to the many layers and facets of this iconic novel. Moreover, through research, Moby Dick has been published in hundreds of versions, providing readers of all knowledge levels with access to what appears to be a simple story of adventure. So why are we wasting our time when, on the surface level (pun intended). I’m eager to know more and why.


Speaking of high school, Moby Dick often was a gay joke in class or would release a few immature snickers when it would be said in class by the teacher. That is also a possibility, which explains why the title is well known, but the heart of Moby Dick remains. Not only did the Bible make Jonah and the Whale a staple in religious stories, but also the first animated version of Pinocchio made an incredible impact on the lives of children around the world. It was released in the 1940s and remains referenced to this day. I believe this has had a profound impact on the legacy of Moby Dick in American history, as it’s deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness from childhood onward; familiarity is quite comforting.


“Overly homoerotic passages.” What can I say, that too caught my eye. Leave it to the gays to make a literary icon gain new relevance as a gay icon. Watch out Babadook! Brendan Fraser plays a gay character in the 2022 film The Whale, where he plays an ailing English professor struggling in his relationship with his teenage daughter, but is restored through an essay she wrote on Moby Dick. In the finale (spoiler alert), Brendan Fraser reads the essay aloud to his angsty daughter right before they both smile at each other, and he dies, floating away into an imaginary white light crossing over the sea. Moby Dick… the icon that you are! Slay momma


Philip Hoare even states’ Moby-Dick’ is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase, will do.” This is what keeps the legacy alive. No matter how you interpret it, there is no wrong answer, and there’s something to find inside the Whale that is missing in us all. There is no answer to life, but from the sound of things, Moby Dick may have some answers to keep the world turning. I’ll be sure to revisit this post come December and see if I have an answer to some of life’s questions (homoerotic or not) with the help of Herman Melville.


“No, my first name ain’t Whale. It’s Moby… Mr Dick, if you’re nasty!”

Man’s Obsessiveness with Nature in ‘What Moby Dick Means to Me’

Posted on by
Reply

What caught my eye in this article by Hoare, were the two novels compared to Moby Dick: Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights.

He says: “…the former (Wuthering Heights) in its own witness to one man’s obsessive interference with nature, was a direct influence on Melville…)

I agree with Hoare’s choices on novels here. It is true that Shelley and Brontë introduce us to worlds where man’s unrelenting obsession with the natural world can both serve as a tool to further understand the “sublime” or for worse, to arrive at the merciless wilderness where only the strong survive. In short, nature contains the potentialities for savagery but also grace. I also think it is interesting that all three novels were conceived at a time period between “the primeval old and and the impossibly new, between an abiding sense of certitude and the dissembling future.”

I found a compelling passage from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:

…For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain“

This points to the pessimistic view of the world that Victorians had as they tried to understand the natural world but arrived at a strong notion of uncertainty, closely tied to the understandings of faith and nature.

Returning to Our Beginnings – John Gillis’s article “The Blue Humanities”

Posted on by
1

In his 2013 essay The Blue Humanities, John Gillis writes about the seemingly profound connection between modern Western culture and the sea. He writes, “The sea lurks in the imaginations of millions, if not billions, of people who will never test its waters. It is forever in our dreams and nightmares…” This line resonates with me on many levels. It broadly captures a paradox that speaks deeply: as our direct interaction with the sea becomes rarer, fewer people make their living from it; it gains a symbolic presence instead. For me, this mirrors how we often romanticize or maybe mythologize experiences that we have grown disconnected from.

I think that Gillis’s observations throughout his article perfectly capture the transition many of us have made: the more removed we become from it, the more the sea inhabits our dreams, our art, and our sense of wonder and curiosity. There’s also a psychological aspect to this: the more we lose direct contact with something, the more room there is for our imagination to fill in. The sea becomes less a physical place and more a canvas for freedom, or danger, depth, and mystery. Gillis points out that for much of Western history, writers and artists hardly looked at the water at all. Instead, it was just the gap between coasts. A space one had to cross in order to reach land. Artists painted the boats or animals within the waters, but not the waters themselves. Only when people no longer had to live on or by the ocean daily did it seem to become visible in new ways.

Another passage that struck me comes when Gillis writes: “Pristine nature, now in short supply in industrialized heartlands, found refuge in the oceans, while the mystery once associated with terra incognita relocated to the deeps. Simultaneously, the sublime, previously associated with mountains and forests, came to be associated with wild water.” This moment helped me to see how cultural ideas about beauty, wilderness, and awe are not fixed; they actually do shift as our environments change. Once people had cut down forests, climbed mountains, and mapped the land, the mystery they so desperately wanted was no longer available, so it had to be sought elsewhere: the sea.

I find this meaningful because it speaks to the way humans seem to always be searching for spaces that remind us of our smallness. I have the same feeling when standing next to the ocean—that feeling of insignificance but amazement. Gillis’s point helped me see that the sea is not just a physical reality but also a vessel for what we may have lost on land. The need for untouched beauty and mystery seems to stay with the ocean.

What is the ocean?

Posted on by
1

Reading Gills’ article was mostly me reacting “oh right,” “that’s true,” “that’s fair,” “interesting, I share the same sentiments.” I was more in awe about the evolution of sea exploration than the studies themselves, how it went from “how to survive at sea” to “let’s explore more of the unknown.” It’s as if navigating the seas were just as treacherous as learning how to drive. But what fascinated me more is that writers and painters turned the ocean “into a place of spiritual and physical recreation… In an era when everything seemed to be in a state of becoming, (the ocean) represented the flow of life in ways that the land could not.” To me this means that the ocean became a literary device. For example, the ocean in Moana guides and lifts her spirits in her journey to Maui and Te Fiti. Metaphorically, in the Life of Pi, it both helps and threatens Pi with waves and storms. Then there’s a tiger, but even he is afraid of the water’s mysteries. Moana and Life of Pi are both works depicting the ocean playing different roles. It’s become a crucial literary device with cultural and symbolic significance.

This article is an eye-opening for Moby-Dick.

Posted on by
2

After reading What ‘Moby Dick’ Means to Me, written by Philip Hoare, I discovered a lot of interesting points that needed to be addressed in this blog. The first point I want to make is how the writer mentioned Moby-Dick is not just a book, but rather how one interprets the text. Hoare wrote: “I didn’t know then what I do now: that “Moby-Dick” can be whatever you want it to be. It took me thirty years to discover what the book was—or what it was not.”. When I read this particular quote, it makes me ponder the possibilities of the book being more than just texts, and you have to pay really close attention to how these phrases create meanings. And when I first read this quote, I thought to myself: “Thirty years is probably a little bit of exaggeration”, but then it hit me, with a book being that size, thirty years is needed to be able to explore the possibilities of the meanings inside this book. The careful consideration and dedication were probably put into dissecting the true meaning of these texts. Another interesting question that caught my attention is when Hoare asks: “Could Melville have ever imagined that his book would travel so far, and find such unlikely readers?”. My answer to this question is probably not. The reason why I think of it this way is because I have learned that Melville was quite depressed during his time of writing because Moby-Dick was not the reader’s favorite as he thought it would be, and that hit him hard. My guess is that Meville accepts the idea of a book not being famous, but it is still one of his signature marks that he left behind for future generations. He accomplished finishing a book, and I believe he went out knowing that his work is still there even if he is gone for a long time. It will find its way to the readers, and even if it is not, then at least he wrote something that he himself believes he could write. I haven’t read the book yet, but after reading these articles for the past couple of weeks, I have to say that I am eager to read Moby Dick, and I am very excited to listen to our discussions about the book. 

The Modern West: The Vast Sea

Posted on by
2

I have always viewed the ocean with such hesitancy, afraid of what the water might contain—but why exactly is that?  That humans as a collective, have such a compelling fear towards this part of our world?

Perhaps because the ocean acts much like a beast as it roars recklessly—too close for comfort. Unlike the stars which are only a glimpse into the heavens, untouching in nature, unless we reach out to it, the ocean is willing and wanting to drag you into the depths of its underworld. 

However, despite this fear, I have an unrelenting urge to understand its dark beauty as a reflection of my own. I’ve learned now that the fear that I’ve come to associate the ocean with is imaginative at most, a product of projected emotions towards something I can’t fully comprehend, so my own mind chooses to fill in the gaps. 

“The human mind delights in grand visions of supernatural beings. And the sea is their very best medium, the only environment in which such giants . . . can be produced and developed.” (Jules Verne). 

This monstrous scale of how big the ocean is, is quite terrifying. However, looking at the ocean from the lens of modern western culture, we can draw similarities to these collective feelings, that help us explain why we feel this way while simultaneously learning more about the ocean and ourselves.  

The Western Front was initially characterized as dangerous, unfit for civilized life, and full of the unknown both good and bad–much like how people view the ocean. It wasn’t until man took that step into the wild that he was able to see the enriching qualities of what the land had to offer in terms of what we can extract from it and what we can extract from within ourselves by understanding the nature around us. 

However, that’s not to say that we don’t have our own monsters inside us that the water reflects quite clearly back at us. Monsters that drive us to pursue and kill wonderful creatures to exchange for profit. Much like the west, the ocean is a wilderness of its own right—having been subjected to the same cruelties of the effects of industrialization.

 Shifting the view of thinking about the land by understanding it as a part of us, humanizes it, and propels us away from that fear of the unknown.

No, I Am Not Paying $1 And Risk Forgetting to Cancel

Posted on by
2

As the title said, I’m not putting my information on a newspaper website just to gain access to content I can get in 30 other articles for free. But because I have to read this particular one, I had to do a super pro gamer move called “quick-scan” where the further I have to scroll down, the more I gamble if the next screenshot I take is after the next paragraph, something new, or if I’ve been screenshotting the same paragraph for the past 20 attempts!!!! I found this was efficient as the website would always block my access after 2 seconds or less of reading.

For the little I was able to read, it looked like Hoare grew a sort of appreciation for the book. After comparing it to Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, he mentioned it was as if “it reads like something that was written before books were invented, yet it is utterly modern—pre–postmodern perhaps. It is part of its own prediction, as if it and its characters had been there all along, and had only been waiting to be written.” I found this particularly enticing: it’s a notoriously boring book on-par with two of the most known novels, written like a timeless artifact. Based on the latter sentence, it seemed the book was written with a mix of outlining and pantsing, which makes it an “experimental” narrative, as Melville possibly wrote with not much direction and clear direction simultaneously.