Moby-Dick: Chasing Nature, Hunting God

Herman Melville's epic tale of Captain Ahab, Ishmael, Starbuck, and Queequeg and their pursuit—on the Pequod—of the titular white whale first appeared in 1851. From then until the present day, the extravagant thematic and structural experiments and demands of the book have earned it a split reputation. Lauded as the first American work to rival John Milton and William Shakespeare for imaginative power and moral, philosophical, psychological scope, the novel has also routinely been derided as digressive and incoherent, as swerving from sermon to drama without enough style or intellectual power either to instruct or entertain. This course explores what in Moby Dick has made it the most famous and admired work of American literature across the globe, while paying attention to the qualities which have earned it scorn. The essential power of the book comes in the stakes set on this whale voyage by Captain Ahab. Chasing, finding, and killing the white whale, for Ahab, is tracking down, isolating, and destroying the cause of all evil, injustice, suffering, and sorrow in life. The gradual revelation of those stakes, and their final result in the lives of the Pequod's crew, give the voyage its dramatic and thematic intensity and earn it, justly, a place with the greatest writing in Western civilization.