Primary Texts: Moby Dick

Catalog description

This course focuses on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Our goal is two-fold. Partly, we learn the art of close reading to reveal the complex layers of meaning in a text. Partly, we expand the canon of political thought by exploring how a literary text asks foundational political questions. Indeed, the only profound thinkers about politics in American history are the great literary artists, like Melville, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison. Only they analyze American life and politics with the depth and artfulness we find in Plato, Hobbes, Marx, or Nietzsche. We read Melville, then, to explore how he dramatizes questions about the nature of nature, the practice of philosophy, the meaning of justice, the forming of national identity, racial violence and empire, the role of myth (and art) in culture. In addition to Moby Dick, we read Melville’s greatest short stories—“Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy Budd”—as well as scholarly readings about American culture and politics.