Moby-Dick

White Whales: American fictions of monomania, failure, and finitude

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The John Adams Institute presented a two day course at Boekhandel Van Rossum on Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby-Dick, taught by George Blaustein, associate professor at the University of Amsterdam. Grand, strange, sometimes nonsensical, occasionally prophetic, and funnier than you expect, Moby-Dick is as subtle as a sledgehammer and yet as elusive as vapor. Why …

The John Adams Institute presented a two day course at Boekhandel Van Rossum on Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby-Dick, taught by George Blaustein, associate professor at the University of Amsterdam. Grand, strange, sometimes nonsensical, occasionally prophetic, and funnier than you expect, Moby-Dick is as subtle as a sledgehammer and yet as elusive as vapor.

Why do we treat it with such reverence? Why is it the “great American novel”? Why do we need a great American novel at all? And what did Moby-Dick mean in its own time and what should it mean in ours?

 

 


If you like our past program, take a look at our upcoming speakers.