Tag Archives: week 14

Week 13: What’s next….

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

I feel like I still need to learn more and understand a bit more about close reading certain things. I’ve been to overwhelmed with the class and by all the information that I have zero idea on what I’m going to do. I’m not much of a creative artsy type of person, so I’m just bee doing an essay. For my final project, I will be discussing about mental health, alcoholism, obsession and more into the mental health part of the chapters, I’ll mostly be focusing on Ahab, Pip and Ishmael depending on how it goes and the subject. Close reading has become such an experience to do in my life and still need practice on it too. I still need to do research and find some examples from the chapters of the book and see where this goes.

Final Project Thoughts

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What do you still need to learn/do for your final project?
Melville’s use of circles, physical and metaphorical, in Moby Dick has caught my attention and I will explore that concept for my final project. I have interpreted this shape to be Melville’s discussion of infinity and Eternity, and endless cycles that make up life. For my project, I would like to dive deeper into this concept and find out what is the bigger purpose of it in the narrative and what does it tell us about the overall message of the book. What does Eternity represent for Melville? Should we as readers find the idea comforting, terrifying, or both? Is the point to be nihilistic or optimistic? All important questions for me to consider. In my case, I need to scan the book to find examples of this concept and contrast them with each other on how they are being used and for what. Compiling excerpts will give me a better idea of the kind of argument they make and the argument I will be making. I also need to do more research for the reference part of our project, so I am excited to dive back into our reading list and beyond and let my project take shape from there. Finally, once I have my argument (or while forming it) I’ll decide if it suits me better to do a long essay or choose a creative medium with a short essay. Both ideas sound doable for what I will be talking about, but I’ll give myself more time to decide the medium.

wk 14: A work in progress…

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I want to extend my discussion of fossils, and the fossil whale, or the whale as an artifact and history, through an essay. To do this I wanted to incorporate other mentions of the whale as an archeological site, besides my original focus on ch104: The fossil whale. I want to emphasize the conversations on history that are had in this book, which requires some deep diving and recalling throughout the scope of this book. The reason I wanted to focus on this topic is because,, as a lover of history, I was drawn to the deconstruction of what counts as history, what gets told and what gets tossed under the rug of time. 

Thesis under construction: 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 it’s print among the land, part of a momentary recession of the waterline. The whale, in this sense, dismantles the American canon of permanence and ownership over a continent during an age of border expansion.

This is a very early version of my thesis, as you can see, I’m still very caught between the fossil v history, and the fossil v borders/maps. 

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.