Final Project Proposal

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For my final project, I will be painting a scene of whales breastfeeding! I was inspired by chapter 87, The Grand Armada, and Professor Pressman’s article on breastfeeding to make this for my final project! I am currently almost done with the painting, I just need to add some final touches, and I could bring to to class on Thursday to show!

Along with the painting, I will be writing the paper explaining why I chose this subject in particular. I wanted to analyze the aspect of the feminine nature of the ocean and the beauty of the whales breastfeeding in this moment, as the rest of the book is filled with violence of harming these beautiful creatures for what they can get from them.

Thesis: Despite no feminine presence aboard the Pequod, the vast oceans hold some of the most beautiful feminine nature within. Seen in chapter 87, The Grand Armada, we read of a beautiful scene of sperm whales that even describes nursing whales exuding a beautiful, tender moment of a womanly presence and act, breastfeeding! Although the presence of women is sparse in this book, Melville does grace us with a motherly nature in the ocean seen by these misunderstood creatures amid the violence they commit towards the whales throughout the rest of the book.

Final Project Proposal

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For my final project proposal, I wanted to analyze the symbolism of the fossil whale, or the whale as an artifact and history, through an essay. As stated in the asynchronous peer review, I’ll discuss the implications of Ishmael’s description of the whale as an archaeological site, both as living and as dead (fossil). My focus will be on ch104: The Fossil Whale. I want to emphasize the conversations on history that are had in this book, the deconstruction of what counts as history, what gets told, and what gets tossed under the rug of time.

Thesis: 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 its print among the land, part of a momentary recession of the waterline. The whale, in this sense, dismantles the American idealism of permanence and ownership over a continent during an age of border expansion.

Charting the Unchartable

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Steve Mentz’s poem “The Chart” uses mapmaking as a metaphor to show that the ocean cannot be easily simplified, measured, or controlled. The poem starts by calling the act of representing the sea “an impossible project” (Mentz, ln 1). Instead of blaming mapmakers, Mentz questions why people want to make the world easier to manage. The sea is not only huge, but also complex to understand, constantly moving and changing in ways that charts cannot capture. The central tension in the poem comes from the gap between the ocean’s wild complexity and our wish to fit it on paper.

Mentz explains that charts make us think the world is more stable than it really is. They suggest that everything can be shown with straight lines and fixed points. However, the poem points out that the places we mark are never as “stable or singular” as they look on the chart. While a chart can help someone find their way, it also limits what they notice. It encourages people to focus on control rather than openness, on predicting rather than experiencing, and on mastering rather than being curious. The poem quietly criticizes this narrow way of seeing, which has shaped many ocean stories, from whalers to explorers to anyone who mistakes a map for the real world.

The poem suggests a different way to move through the ocean, one that relies more on paying attention than on being certain. Sailing “without” the chart does not mean rejecting knowledge, but recognizing its limits. It means staying open to the sea’s “comingling and flow” and letting experience lead, instead of forcing things to fit a set plan. In the end, when the chart is said to “emulate” the world only “in parts,” the poem makes its main point: our attempts to represent the world are always incomplete, but that is not a failure. Instead, it shows the world’s richness. “The Chart” encourages us to value what we cannot fully capture and to approach the ocean, and any complex reality, with humility instead of control.

Final Project Proposal: The Modern Extracts

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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.

Final Proposal

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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.

EC: Melville Reborn

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I believe that the book is able to get its credit after the antebellum period in America, because, much of the reason why the book had failed was because much of our nation’s foundation relied on the very things Melville attested against in the big book. This left the American conservatives offended and the British audiences to be spectators amused by the entertainment it brought to them. Majority of both sides ruled out the big book as excessive and not moving. It is mentioned that only some critics saw the significance of Moby Dick for what it embodied to them at a critical time: a social commentary that is striking because it is broad and extensive, confronting multiple perspectives of an underlying issue without constructing the focal point down to one commentary.

Reigel indirectly points out this marveled technique of Melville, stating that, “From what that ‘Herman Melville’ character is which has been discovered by recent critics, and its meaning to modern life, one must go to the works and autobiographies”(Reigel 200). This book is not just action packed and blood-gore filth entertainment that some Americans and British readers thought this was; but, it is a book that memorializes and fossilizes human record and tragedy in order to preserve the real horror of humanity in the world. The author does not completely remove himself from the destruction, but being seen as a “character” in his own novel, he alters how novels are merely narrative for narrative’s sake; he represents and volunteers as the active agent in American society. One can be acceptive of this meditation, or one can be instantly offended by its general exploitation in all accounts and write off this novel as excessive. Whatever the case, many critics during the 19th century have kept this book as a way to pave the American consciousness that is direct and instigative, moving the era where post-modernism emerges.

Final Project Proposal

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The final project is on human greed in commercialization with exploitation of the carcass as a way to inadvertently dissect religion in society. Near the end of chapter 104 is the passage that will be evaluated. By deconstructing the location of the unknown place of worship, and the Diety in replacement of the whale, it is exposed that we place our faith in seen symbols, taking away the focus on the true point of worship– God, in this case– and use these symbols from a place of security, or weaponization of the religion. I found the use of demonstrating the carcass as sacrifice critical in instigating the foundation of religion as exploitive, manipulative, and cruel. Ultimately, the premise is to examine the androgynous nature of the temple and the whale in this passage, and how this becomes a social commentary on the Industrial Revolution. This paper will be an essay. 

American Patriotism

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In “The Anatomy of Melville’s Fame” it is surprising to read Riegel’s comments on how influential the British critics were in slowing Melville’s and Moby Dick’s rise to literary prestige. Although, thinking about it, it makes sense when considering “The American Scholar”. Emerson writes: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” It is now clear how necessary Emerson’s call for American scholarship and pride was. Scholarly, Americans were still under the tutelage of the British thinkers. Living an in overly patriotic America, it is hard to wrap a modern mind around the need for American pride. In fact, in Moby Dick it seemed that Melville was critiquing American patriotism. Using Ahab as an allegory for a patriotism that is blind to its own flaws. This is why it was unexpected to read: “Had Americans felt more cultural pride and less inclination to grovel before British oracles, Melville might have become then, as he is now, a great hero of American national consciousness.”  Melville was not only ahead of his time in his critique on religion and racial issues. He also saw the danger of America’s emerging patriotism. Melville saw how Manifest Destiny and expansionism was leading to a blind patriotism. The kind that ignores flaws and breeds dictators.

Riegel points out that the most recent revival of Melville started in 1919 and continues on today, today being 1931. Riegel says “that the recent revival of interest in Melville has been attributed by some to ‘the spirit of the age.” But in its truth the “term is difficult to define”. He goes on to ponder the spirit as the “appeal of Melville’s boldness and expansiveness” or as the decade’s “devotion to psychological history… to spiritual struggle… to the spectacle of man against the world.” Riegel even mentions “post-war psychosis of futility”. But I was shocked to find he didn’t mention post-war patriotism. 1919 marked the end of World War One and America’s entrance as a major world power both militarily and economically. Post-war American patriotism might be another reason Melville’s great American novel made yet another comeback into the literary world.

Final project proposal

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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.

Final Project Proposal

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I’ve not yet managed to reword my thesis, but the basis behind the final essay revolves around questions of how to “read.”

Thesis: Through the use of (my creative project) and a passage from chapter 79 “The Prairie”, the grand animal encapsulates the incapability of the human mind to decipher the creature. Melville utilizes the whale and its brow as a symbol of unknowingness. This then poses a criticism towards flawed sciences and a reconfiguration of philosophy.

Essentially, what I am trying to convey is the way Melville talks about the sciences and philosophies behind “reading.” We’ve come to understand that phrenology is a flawed science from this era, but in addition to that, there is also the science behind animal classification. I plan on utilizing the whole “read my brow” section within The Prairie chapter. Alongside my Halloween costume (yes I’m sure you all know the one), it made me think about the fact that we’re still actively kind of “reading” things. How do we know what a whale is, how do we assume to know what a whale thinks, does the whale’s brow mean anything to it, it’s questions like these that make it seem like Melville has something more at play despite the short chapter. The novel has a focus on the inscrutable and unreadable towards nature, and I think it makes a statement that science and philosophy is not a perfect thing. It’s flawed and still actively changing, even now. Albeit, many people still stick to the popular customs and rules of either practice because that is just the grander consensus.