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.
I think this is very special! Explaining what Moby Dick means to you will require you to have a very clear argument about what Moby Dick means and then explaining how it taught you that lesson. If this is about reading and close reading, you will need to show us where and how the novel teaches us to close read and then demonstrate how it taught you to do that.
Again, I would suggest looking at the prefatory reading that I assigned early in the term: Hoare and Philbrick, as both of them do a great job with this topic and modality. Steve Mentz also writes about what the novel means to him, both in the poems that we are reading this week, but also in his scholarship and on his blog.
Eager to read this!