“Call me Ishmael.” Moby-Dick’s opening line is one of the most famous in all of world literature. 2019 will mark the 200th anniversary of Herman Melville’s birth and provides an apt time to explore the continued resonance of his best-known work. A critical and popular failure when it was first published in 1851, Moby-Dick, as the novel’s narrator says of the eponymous whale, has become “not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time).” With numerous adaptations, from films to children’s board books to comic books, and allusions to Ahab and his iconic pursuit of the white whale frequently appearing in political discourse and popular culture, Melville’s novel has circulated as a cultural touchstone over the past 150+ years.
This seminar will explore how Melville’s novel has taken on different meanings and uses from the time of its publication to the present as we move between close examination of the novel and its moment of creation to its afterlife through the twentieth century to now. In particular, we will focus on how different disciplines, from political science, to economics, to biology and environmental studies, religious studies, and psychology have turned to Melville’s novel in exploring their specific fields of interest. While our focus will be Melville’s novel, Moby-Dick will serve as a launching pad for thinking more broadly about how artworks persist and evolve over time as they are criticized, adapted, and adopted in changing historical and cultural contexts. If all works out, we will attempt to have a class trip for a whale watching cruise out of Cape May.
About Professor Gilmore
Dr. Paul Gilmore is a distinguished scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, with an emphasis on science and aesthetics. Before coming to Rutgers, he was for more than a decade a professor in the English department at California State University, Long Beach, where he also served as graduate studies coordinator. A recipient of an NEH fellowship, his publications include The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Duke UP, 2001) and Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford UP, 2009).