Moby-Dick, Scholarship and Teaching
Last Tuesday night, I had the pleasure of participating in the “The Final Pursuit,” a live closing session for the “Moby-Dick Big Read” hosted by Peninsula Arts at Plymouth University. The event was put together by Peninsula Arts director Sarah...
Moby-Dick, Scholarship and Teaching
And so, finally, we reach the end. When Moby-Dick was published in London by Richard Bentley on October 18, 1851 (using Melville’s original title, The Whale), it seemed to end with the haunting final words of Chapter 135: Now small fowls flew screaming over the...
Moby-Dick, Scholarship and Teaching
And so we reach the climactic confrontation between Ahab and the white whale, Moby Dick. It’s a beautiful morning, which prompts Ahab to meditate on the way that feeling often overrules thinking: “What a lovely day again! Were it a new-made world, and made...
Moby-Dick, Scholarship and Teaching
In “The Tail,” Ishmael refers to the phenomenon of breaching, when the whale bounds out of the water and elevates itself into the air before plunging down again: As in the ordinary floating posture of the Leviathan the flukes lie considerably below the...
Moby-Dick, Scholarship and Teaching
LIke a dog following a scent, Ahab detects “that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale” as the chapter opens. As he is hoisted to his perch atop the main royal-mast head, he spies his prey: “There she...
