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.
Do you have a strong thesis here: “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.” I’m excited about the format for the project, and I might ask you to think more about the form in genre of collage– perhaps you can do a little research to explain how its cut-up and multimedia manifestation matter to your argument. But this sounds good, and I am eager to read it!