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Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is one of the most canonical texts of American literature and culture. In class, we will first of all closely examine the text’s structure, design, and main objectives by reading excerpts (reading the whole book is strongly recommended). In the second part, we will trace the text’s reverberations in cultural products from the 20th and 21st century; among them films and postmodernist texts. Students will be introduced to the period of the American Renaissance as well as mechanisms of canon formation, US-American nation building, and critical approaches to whiteness and masculinity.
Books to be bought and read: Herman Melville Moby-Dick and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. All other texts will be provided on Moodle. |
