I know that this post falls after the deadline, but I’m writing it more to jot down my ideas and key takeaways from the readings and see if anyone else can relate. When Hoare wrote that “‘Moby-Dick’ is not a novel,” but “an act of transference, of ideas and evocations hung around the vast and unknowable shape of the whale, an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history,” it kind of clicked for me. It reminds me of our first day of the semester, when most of us were confessing to feeling overwhelmed before even starting the novel. Hoare’s comment connects to how Melville, as an author, didn’t write the novel as just a book, but a time capsule of the ideas of the 19th century. Emerson, whom we’ve talked about influencing Melville, urged 20th-century scholars to think for themselves and to work towards intellectual development constantly. This singular quote from this article began a domino effect on how to better approach Moby Dick as an intimidated reader. Instead of reading Moby Dick as a novel like Pride and Prejudice (where the details aren’t elaborated on too extensively and it’s very specifically plot-focused instead of detail-focused), it’s meant to be interpreted, not merely clicked off on my Goodreads “read” shelf.