Week 13

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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

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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

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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.

Final Project

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I have already mapped out what I will be submitting for my final project. For the final project I’ll be submitting a well thought-out essay that represents a culmination of ideas and feelings I’ve obtained throughout the reading of the novel. I’ll invest time researching and reviewing topics we’ve discussed to help contribute with my writing. I plan on expanding on concepts I’ve touched on throughout the semester but there are some other ideas I didn’t get to discuss and ideas I’ve read on the blog posts that I found very interesting and worth noting in writing. Overall, I feel really good going into the final project. The feedback was extremely helpful and I know not only what to expect but also what Professor Pressman will be looking for.

Thinking about the final

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For my final project, I wanna piece together the thoughts I had throughout the semester so it ties together towards a bigger statement about this book/why its important and still is. I will go through my old blog posts/essays to get some ideas, but i definitely want to focus on Moby Dick and how its messages from the 1800s are super relevant today. I wanna stick to a more modern lens/interpretation with this book in my essay.

That’s all I really have so far right now, I honestly get my ideas while I am writing so once I start with a thesis I’ll hopefully have more details to post about!

A Lasting Impact

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

Screenshot

of course I want to be creative and do a romantic music video with one of our peers, Omar, where we recreate My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion and him and I play Melville and Hawthorne and recreate scenes from the Titanic and Moby Dick. Being the more handsome of the bunch, I would clearly play Melville. Listen, I didn’t make the rules Dr Pressman did and I’m just abiding by them. Omar has a better idea for his project so he rejected me! How rude! 😉

So ive been pondering what to do, and being in the last week of class and seeing the impact Moby Dick has had on the entire entertainment industry, I would like to explore that with close reading and symbolism that has kept this book alive for so long and how many have adapted and interpreted in serval different ways. It’s going to research heavy and a challenge but this sounds fun actually for me. I may be Ahab and if done right this could be my Moby Dick… without the sinking ship part of course.

Week 13: Final Project

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

I feel like there’s so much that I still need to learn before diving into my final project. I’m planning to write a creative poem that touches on how Moby Dick directly responds to Emerson’s call for the “American Scholar,” incorporating form and direct quotes from both Melville’s novel and Emerson’s lecture to create a complete work that illustrates the call-and-response relationship between the two. I’m sort of ping ponging between what actual form and structure to use for the poem and the specifics of what I want to say, how to say it, and then the actuality of how to present it. I think it’s hard because poetry sometimes clicks into place and feels right in a particular form, so I need to play around with it a little bit more. Additionally, I need to reread Emerson’s work and revisit the several moments in Melville’s novel that I tabbed for their connection.

Week 13- “Melville Reborn, Again and Again”

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After reading the article, “Melville Reborn, Again and Again”, Melville choosing to use whaling and the white whale to demonstrate the themes in Moby-Dick such as obsession, subjectivity, and revenge has fascinated me. He used his knowledge and the popularity (although dwindling) of whaling to write a literary masterpiece. By indulging in the popular topic of the Essex, Melville gave his readers for hundreds of years to come a glimpse into whaling. Without his novel, whaling as we know it might have been lost in history. While it never become popular during his lifetime, it is one of the most well know books in history. For it to relate to topics happening nearly 200 years later, shows the true testimony Melville was striving for. 

Thanksgiving Week

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

For my final project, I am thinking about close reading the bay/boat when I go to my next sailing class, and writing something about that. Whenever I am at that class, I always think about Moby Dick because of how boring it is. We are using the wind to sail as they did back then, and I swear it is the most boring thing ever. We rig the boat, and then sail around Mission Bay for like an hour, and all I think is that everyone on that boat in Moby Dick must’ve been on the border of insanity and I can understand why Ahab lost it. Because staring at the water going by, the sunlight reflecting off of it, and literally nothing happening except just trying to catch wind and steer somewhere, is horribly boring. I think I want to observe this boredom in parallel to the chapters in Moby Dick that are, also, dreadfully boring, dragging on, slowly floating through page after page of nothingness.

I think sailing also gave me a lot of context for this novel. Even though it was just on the bay, it did allow me to imagine how it would be if the water just stretched on and on for miles, as well as how fluid of a state the water is in. I can always reach down and touch it, but it never stays in one place.

We’re on the home stretch

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

So, I already have a strong idea of what creative project I want to do for my final paper, I’m just solidifying my thesis statement for the paper portion of it. I’m planning to re-read Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale in the next couple of days so that I can have a solid foundation to build upon.

For the creative project, I found a beautiful set of book ends that are the head and the tail of a sperm whale. I was initially thinking of taking the head and using Paper-Mache to envelop it in every page from Chapter 42, then have the forehead read “It was never about a whale.” It would be set either inside of the book at Chapter 42 or — using both ends — I would have them as the literal book ends on a copy of Moby Dick. This works as a kind of physical manifestation of what people perceive Moby-Dick to be about, wrapped in the chapter that is the most well known of the book.

Through this project, I argue that Melville uses the whale to critique the expectations readers bring to the symbols – showing that the whale is never simply a whale, but a surface onto which meaning is compulsively imposed. The whiteness that terrifies Ishmael arises not from the animal itself but from the human impulse to project significance onto what fundamentally resists understanding. By wrapping the whale in the physical text of Chapter 42, my artwork materializes Melville’s insight that the White Whale’s terror is generated through the very act of interpretation.

As a kind of related aside: I read once that to understand the social commentary of a horror novel, you need to remove the monster from it. Whatever story you have left is really what the story is about. With Moby-Dick, which monster would you have to remove to understand the commentary on — Ahab or Moby-Dick? Or are either of them truly to blame for the events of the novel?

My biggest takeaway from this novel is that there is so much we cannot ever know, but there is so much that we can miss on our first read through. There are so many strands that Melville is weaving here, from the aspect of race, slavery, nation, capitalism, obsession, etc. there’s so much that you can see in this book. I want to try and read the book again with a different focus each time so that I can see what changes in my perception of the book.