1.24.08 Melville

1
1.24.08 Melville

• Business
• Whiteness
• HW
• Read Poe in your Reader.
• Melville folks need to post claim paragraphs in
  the Melville discussion area by 130 tomorrow.
• Everyones response paragraphs due by 5 on Fri.
  You can respond to any of the conversations,
  Sontag, Hawthorne, or Melville.
• Remember, you will have to post on Melville
  sometime, if not this week then some week in the
  future.

2
The So What A word on yesterdays discussion.

• There are always a wide variety and a wide range
  of stakes for every piece of literature, some
  referring to the text at hand or a tradition of
  reading, others to large moral and philosophical
  debates.
• The stakes for your discussion generally depend
  on
• The context in which you are writing,
• Who you are writing for,
• What you are invested in, what you find
  interesting.

3
Examples of stakes.

• At stake in my discussion, or the so what of my
  discuisson, is
• An understanding of the letter A that opens up a
  new reading of the text, that shows its
  investment in blah blah blah.
• Your ever lasting soul (morality).
• The readers ability to make up his or her own
  mind, to follow their imagination, etc.

4
Epilogue

• The letter A
• "The reader may choose among these theories. We
  have thrown all the light we could acquire upon
  the portent, and would gladly, now that it has
  done its office, erase its deep print out of our
  own brain where long meditation has fixed it in
  very undesirable distinctness" 237

5
White

• What associations do you have with the color
  white?
• Have you ever found white appalling?

6
Moby-Dick

• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-DickSymbolism

7
The Whiteness of the Whale

• Notice this chapter has no plot development. What
  is the narrator's stated purpose for this
  chapter?
• How does he proceed? What is the structure of his
  discussion?
• What does "white" typically represent?
• Why does the narrator say that "It was the
  whiteness of the whale that above all things
  appalled me"?
• What then does the White Whale mean?

8
Compare ContrastHow do these compare as
symbols?

• Scarlet Letter A

• Whiteness of the Whale

9
Let's bring it together.

• Put these two symbols, the whiteness of the whale
  and the scarlet letter, into conversation.
• Melville, having dedicated the book to
  Hawthorne, is certainly responding to his
  influence. What, if anything, does this chapter
  have to say to the author of The Scarlet Letter?
  Does anything significant arise from bringing two
  of the most famous symbols in all of US
  literature, the white whale and the scarlet
  letter, together? What are these two author's
  trying to work out?