Category: American Literature
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November 14: Moby-Dick
“Call me Ishmael.” Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick begins with a three-word imperative — one of the most famous openings ever written for a novel. That is it the product not of the late twentieth century, but of the mid-nineteenth, is especially remarkable. Whereas most novels of its day ease the reader into the unfolding story by stages, this…
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Crafting a Literature Program
The liberal arts are, to great measure, founded on written remains, from the earliest times to our own. Literature (broadly construed to take in both fiction and non-fiction) encompasses a bewildering variety of texts, genres, attitudes, belief systems, and just about everything else. Like history (which can reasonably be construed to cover everything we know,…