The Sandy Hook killings recall the Biblical massacre of the innocents, referenced in “Moby Dick.”
With a little imagination, “Moby Dick” can be dramatized as a story about race relations.
Literary allusions are flying fast and free in this primary season.
Also posted in Blake (William), Bunyan (John), Carroll (Lewis), Hawthorne (Nathaniel), Milne (A. A.) | Tagged Alice in Wonderland, Herman Melville, John Bunyan, Lewis Carroll, Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pilgrim's Progress, Presidential campaign, Scarlet Letter, William Blake |
Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” has been adopted by a number of the Occupy Wall Street protesters but, according to one commentator, the story works as an ironic commentary on the movement.
Nathaniel Philbrick describes “Moby Dick” as a “metaphysical survival manual” which helps us understand the nature of tyrants.
Our students, displaced by mold, are being housed in a cruise ship. A campus production of “As You Like It” may have given administrators the idea.
Also posted in Dahl (Roald), Porter (Katherine Anne), Shakespeare (William) | Tagged 2000 Leagues under the Sea, As You Like It, Beatles, Education, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Katherine Anne Porter, Moby Dick, Mold, Ship of Fools, St. Mary's College of Maryland, William Shakespeare |
One of the strangest reading stories I have ever encountered involves an English professor who mysteriously disappeared and Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener.
I’m fascinated by the way that literature has helped shape and guide different American president, a subject I’ve written about in the past. Thus I was thrilled to stumble across a Barack Obama reading list compiled shortly after his inauguration. I don’t know how I missed it. According to the website The Curious Autodidact (great [...]
Also posted in Augustine, Bible, Doctorow (E. L.), Hughes (Langston), Jefferson (Thomas), Malcolm X, Nietzsche (Friedrich), Twain (Mark), Uris (Leon), Warren (Robert Penn) | Tagged Barack Obama, politics, reading |
Randy Kennedy has written a superb article in the New York Times that points out parallels between the Gulf oil spill and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Kennedy says that, in the 19th century, New England whalers had to venture further and further afield to find oil-producing whales (they had depleted the local stock). Melville’s apocalyptic vision is eerily prescient.
