On selected dates during the semester, you will be required to turn in two-part responses to the main course texts. These responses are meant give you an opportunity to brainstorm and explore ideas, and engage more deeply with a specific aspect or passage of your choice. The format, including these two parts explained in greater detail, is as follows:
The title of each response will conform to the following template, using MLA guidelines to create a proper citation to the book in question: “Response to: Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams. New York: Vintage, 1986.”
1. Free-write (half-page): Spend roughly 10 minutes free-writing about the text—in essence writing down ideas as they come without worrying about honing your rhetoric or logic, or polishing your grammar. There is no need for perfection. The idea here is to brainstorm and explore.
2. Engage with the text (1–2 pages): Pick one aspect, such as a chapter, a passage, or a character, and perform a careful, condensed analysis of it. Be sure to quote from the text and to thoughtfully engage with specific passages. Please do not feel obligated to respond to the book as a whole. Be selective and pick a particular facet about the book that is problematic, and in your opinion, worthy of further analysis.
For an example, please see sample response posted below:
Sample Response
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
1. Free-write
Herman the man, the manic white fantasy whale man, so how much of Ishmael was really you, and was that buffalo coat really as frightening as the idea of an albino whale? The east coast deer, the sailor… comes up with some great lines, almost weird enough and flip enough to sound contemporary, a mad digressing writer, yet full of pulling details, long but even a third read through is just as if not more compelling. Mad-cap details of whales and personally styled taxonomy – cetology. Always find it a little strange writing about a writer that has been so written about – writing on top of a pile of piles of piles of words evoked and spurred on by the odd-ball Ishmael’s tale. Fear, vengeance, drive, carnage of immense proportions, curious insights into the crew, fear chasing fear, killing what? Drive for total dominance, anger at impossibility of this sick want, destruction the path, the end.
2. The Text
The white whale, or Moby Dick – by far the most prominent animal of the novel – is representative of an infinite variety of fears and powers. It (he/she?) is a potential agent of god (if considered in the light of father Mapple’s sermon), just as likely an agent of the devil (carnivorous and voracious as the sharks in chapter 64), and the object of obsession, wrath, curiosity, vengeance, hatred, and even admiration.
While “what the white whale was to Ahab” (Melville, 189) seems to be an insane wrath coupled with the sole intent to hunt down and kill the whale, to Ishmael, Moby Dick and its whiteness represent a plethora of meanings. In chapter 42, Ishmael “almost despair(s) of putting it in a comprehensible form” (189) – as did I upon completing the chapter and learning that “and of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol” (198). However, the “incantation of whiteness” (197) suffered by Ishmael seems to hover between a sense of the (politically powerful) sacred and one of (horrific) death and “supernaturalism.”
To begin his pondering and to “explain (him)self…else all these chapters might be naught” (190), Ishmael focuses upon the beauty imparted to natural objects by the color white, then slips into the “royal pre-eminence” (190) of white when used by the ruling classes from such far-flung places as Siam and Rome. When he reaches the Persian fire worshipers and the White Dog ceremony of the Iroquois, Ishmael makes the move into what he calls the “divine spotlessness and power” (190) of the color.
However, when “divorced from more kindly associations” (191) or its most obvious political and religious usages, whiteness to Ishmael immediately takes on hideous and terrifying, yet also occasionally reverential meanings. Ranging from polar bears and great white sharks to the repellent “Albino man” (193), and Froissart’s murdering “White Hoods of Ghent” (194), Ishmael expounds upon the terrible aspects of whiteness. To this he adds the “supernaturalism” (194) of the color, especially when associated with death’s pallor, shrouds and ghosts. Rounding up his herd of verbiage, Ishmael zeros in upon a series of natural exhibitions of whiteness which cause particular terror in the human (mariner) soul. Included in the list are impenetrable fog, whitened waters, Antarctic seas and frozen wastelands. In “conclusion,” Ishmael reaches the ultimate colorlessness of whiteness and meditates upon the actual and horrifying “charnel house” beneath the ubiquitous yet false face-painting of Nature (198).
The great white whale indeed has a great load of significance to bear, split into the two loads of “the most meaning symbol of spiritual things” and the “intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind” (197). It is a wonder its back does not sway and snap under all of the weight.
In addition to the white whale, whom Melville is so exhaustively precise in describing, there are scores of other animals referred to in Moby Dick. Both the albatross and the White Steed carry a demanding spirituality and a hovering, indescribable horror. The white shark and white bear carry an intensified sense of “intolerable hideousness” (191). There is “the last of the Grisly Bears (who) lived in settled Missouri” (156) used as a comparison of Ahab’s outraged gloom (who recalls, strangely enough, Faulkner’s The Bear). Ishmael’s “Cetology” of chapter 32 speaks for itself. There are the herds of Brit, or plankton, which he compares to field of grass being mown down by the scythe-like baleen of the Right Whales in chapter 58. The mysterious giant squid, believed prey of the sperm whale, is seen as an ill-fated omen by the crew of the Pequod (parallels between the “tribe of Massachussets Indians, now extinct” (70) and the fate of the doomed ship?). Demon-like sharks are referred to in chapters 64 – 69, and described as maggots in the “one huge cheese” (309) of the sea. Towards the end Ishmael compares the “snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds” with the “gentle thoughts of the feminine air,” and the rushing of “mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks” with the “troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea” (543).
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