Melville s Fiction

Deep reading by way of the deep sea: a semester of full immersion in Moby-Dick.  We will also read three of Melville’s short fictions, some literary responses to Melville and various pieces of criticism and contexts, but we’ll approach Melville’s fiction less as scholars than as passionate novel-readers and literary interpreters. We will actually read Moby-Dick twice together, once at the beginning and once at the end of the class.  By focusing on the work of a single author, you’ll have the chance to develop serious familiarity with Melville’s style and fictional worlds as well as to consider what it means to prioritize depth over breadth in literary encounters.