AP/EN 4333 3.0A (F)
Herman Melville
Fall
Time:
Place:
Course Director: Dr. Brett Zimmerman
350 Stong College
416 736-2100
Office hour:
Email: [email protected]
Course Secretary:
208F Stong College
416 736-2100
In contrast to the cheerful idealism, the rosy optimism, of the American Transcendentalists
such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, stood the “dark
Romanticism” of their contemporaries: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman
Melville. Their fiction dwells largely on what Harry Levin calls “the power of blackness,”
an emphasis upon human sin, crime, and guilt. Hawthorne and Melville tend to describe
human depravity less in clinical terms, as Poe does, than in theological terms. Scholars
concerned with the cultural milieu of these two authors suggest that the influence of New
England Calvinism was partly responsible for their pessimism, and certainly Hawthorne’s
vision was coloured by the religion of his Puritan ancestors and his historical expertise in
those early colonists.
Melville’s view of life was characterized by an acknowledgement not only of human but also
of natural evil. His understanding of human depravity was influenced in part by his reading
of Hawthorne and certain Renaissance writers such as Milton and Shakespeare, but also by
his career as a sailor: he had witnessed first-hand the degeneracy of sailors, suffered the
cruelty of tyrannical sea-captains, and to escape them jumped ship only to find himself
among cannibals in the South Pacific. His recognition of natural “evil” was created and
reinforced as well by his days at sea: he had hunted the largest and deadliest creatures in the
ocean and had confronted the frantic voraciousness of other watery predators. He learned
that underneath the apparently serene oceans of the world are “the whale’s black flukes/ and
the white shark’s fin.” He applied this recognition to the cosmos and human existence
generally in exploring in his prose and poems what he referred to as “the sharkishness of
life,” the “horrible vulturism of earth.”
In this course we study three of Melville’s many novels—his first, Typee; his mid-career
masterpiece, Moby-Dick; and his last work, Billy Budd—in addition to several important
short stories and poems. Characteristic topics include cultural relativism, the nature of the
universe, the moral complexities of slavery, the figure of the bachelor (the man of naïve
“half-vision”), paradise lost and regained, the figure of the monomaniac, feminist issues, and
Transcendentalism as a movement and an epistemology. Additionally, we consider aspects
of Melville’s prose style and techniques involving symbolism and allegory.
We take a variety of critical approaches to the texts, including history-of-ideas, feminist,
generic, and New Critical (stylistics, rhetoric).
* an asterisk indicates a text in the course kit
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September 13: Introduction; administrative duties;
CONSULT (in the weeks ahead):
- “Selected Literary History of the United States: 1789-1865”*;
- “Abbreviated Time-Line for Melville”*;
- “Melville and His Contemporary American Authors”*;
- “Characters in Our Major Texts”*
Consult the appropriate sections in “Questions for Directed Reading,” in the course kit,
before or while reading the primary material each week.
Sept. 20:
Paradise Regained? or, My Life Among the Cannibals:
READ (secondary):
- “Introduction to Typee: Its Relation to Travel Literature”*;
- “The Indian Captivity Narrative: an Early North American Literary
Genre”*
READ (primary):
Typee (you can skip the Appendix and the sequel “The Story of Toby”)
Sept. 27:
Typee, continued; poems:
READ (primary):
- “The Maldive Shark”*;
- “The Aeolian Harp”*;
- “The Berg”*
October 4:
Early Feminism from a Male Author; A Study in Polarities:
READ (primary):
- “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”
Oct. 11:
FALL READING WEEK (no classes—whoo hoo!)
Oct. 18:
Terror Fiction; “Sportive Gothic”; Early Science Fiction
READ (secondary):
- “The Features of Gothic Literature”*;
- “American vs. British Gothic Fiction”*;
- “Introduction to ‘The Apple-Tree Table’”*;
READ (primary):
- “The Apple-Tree Table; Or, Original Spiritual Manifestations”*;
- “From the End of Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau”*;
READ (secondary):
- sample essay: “The Gothic Psychomachy and Satire in Melville’s ‘The
Apple-Tree Table’”*
READ (primary):
- “The Bell-Tower”
Oct. 25:
The Shadow over America: The Slavery Question and Racist Stereotypes:
READ (secondary):
- “White Fears: The Power of Blackness”*;
- “Black Fears: The Power of Whiteness”*;
- “Slave Uprisings”*;
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- “African-Americans in U.S. Literature: Types, Stereotypes, & Myths”*;
READ (primary):
- “Benito Cereno”
November 1: Ahab as “Reverse” Transcendentalist:
READ (secondary):
- “Transcendentalism”*;
- “Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman: Transcendental Utterances”*;
- “The Metaphysics of Moby-Dick”*;
- “Classic American Literary Patterns: Dudes in Nature”*
- “Introduction to Moby-Dick”*;
READ (primary):
- Moby-Dick
Nov. 6:
Withdrawal deadline for Fall courses
Nov. 8:
Moby-Dick, continued
Nov. 15:
Moby-Dick, continued
Nov. 22:
Melville’s Final Study of Good and Evil:
READ (secondary):
- “Celestial Map to Illustrate Billy Budd: Taurus”*;
- “Celestial Map to Illustrate Billy Budd: Scorpio”*;
- “Imagery and Symbolism in Billy Budd”;
READ (primary):
- Billy Budd
Nov. 29:
Billy Budd, continued
December 6: review
for final exam
December 6th: essay due; all term work due no later than Friday, Dec. 10th
Final exam during the official exam period in December
Dec. 8:
Fall classes end; last day to submit term work
Course requirements
essay:
exam:
Participation:
JSTOR research assignment:
40%
40%
15%
5%
Students are expected to submit
all assignments to be eligible to
pass this course (although
submission of all assignments
doesn’t guarantee a pass).
Reading list
Primary:
Course Kit:
Billy Budd and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)
“The Apple-Tree Table”
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Moby-Dick (Dover)
Typee (Penguin)
AP/EN 4333 3.0A Herman Melville – course kit
Recommended purchases:
Every serious English major should own
Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th edition
and the latest editions of one or more of the following:
M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms
- not a comprehensive literary catalogue but includes excellent short essays on
various critical approaches to literature
Chris Baldick, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms
- inexpensive because abbreviated; better than nothing
Edwin J. Barton and Glenda A. Hudson, A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms
- expensive, far from comprehensive, but quite useful anyway
Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols.
J. A. Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory
- expensive but comprehensive
Northrop Frye, Sheridan Baker, George Perkins, The Harper Handbook to Literature
Martin Gray, A Dictionary of Literary Terms
William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature
- my personal favourite; expensive but comprehensive
X. J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia, Mark Bauerlein, Handbook of Literary Terms: Literature,
Language, Theory
- short but useful
Edward Quinn, Collins Dictionary of Literary Terms
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