ENG 6939 - FALL 2026 - JAFFE

Among the most theorized texts in the American pantheon, Moby-Dick reads you. Melville told Hawthorne it was a “wicked book.” This seminar will read Moby-Dick as a machine for producing impossible readings, a text that has swallowed psychoanalysts, Marxists, radical thinkers, continental philosophers, ecocritics, media theorists, and avant-garde artists whole and left them all changed and slightly wrecked. We’ll treat the novel as a limit-case: not a classic to be mastered but a problem that keeps generating its own dissatisfied interpreters, each convinced they’ve finally flensed the animal, none of them right. We read Moby-Dick and successive and sometimes conflicting frameworks. Our guides: C.L.R. James (Mariners, Renegades and Castaways), composing his masterpiece in a detention cell on Ellis Island; Charles Olson (Call Me Ishmael), who detonates the novel into a projective poetics of space and breath; Michael Rogin (Subversive Genealogy), who restores Melville to the political wreckage of slavery and Jacksonian democracy; Cesare Casarino (Modernity at Sea), for whom the ship is a laboratory where biopower and labor play out off the books; Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark), on whiteness and the American literary imagination; D.H. Lawrence, whose feverish chapter in Studies in Classic American Literature remains the most unhinged critical encounter with the book on record; and the International Necronautical Society, whose transmissions on death and failure claim Melville as patron saint of the literary undead.