Context.
This week I started teaching my own classes, and the situation made me want to make this blog more interactive and participatory, more practical and immediate. So this week’s entry will be the first journal assignment I gave to my Literary Analysis course, in the hopes that some of you might adopt it and perhaps even try it out in your own classes. Literary Analysis is a lower division course required of all English majors, and the idea behind it is to help teach them to read literature closely and to write about it. This assignment particularly asks them to slow down their reading, to be actively immersed in the process but in ways that avoid technical literary terms and the specialized kinds of knowledge they’ll be involved in later. Most importantly I want from the beginning to be actively involved in constructing their own meanings and become aware of the processes by which they do so—although I would never use directly the words I just used to explain it to you. I want to show them what they can learn from repeated re-readings without mechanically tell.
I’d like to excerpt some of their responses to share with you, without their names or holding anything up to laugh at. I hope some of you might do the same and/or at least try the exercise yourself and comment on what you learned by doing it. And I hope some of you might reciprocate by sharing your assignments with the rest of us. One of the things I love about teaching is that
Pictures and Words: At the beginning of chapter 3,“The Spouter-Inn,” the narrator (call him Ishmael) enters the foyer of a dilapidated old inn (chosen precisely because it looked so run-down and cheap) in New Bedford. He is on the eve of a whaling voyage, or at least of a packet voyage to Nantucket, where he will board for the first time a whaling ship. As he enters, he stops before a painting that he can barely make out:
[1]Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. [2]On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. [3]Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. [4]But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last came to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
[5]But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. [6]A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. [7]Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. [8]Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. [9]--It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. [10]--It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. —[11]It's a blasted heath. —[12]It's a Hyperborean winter scene. --[13]It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. [14] But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. [15] That once found out, and all the rest were plain. [16]But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
[17]In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. [18]The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
Your first task is to try to replicate this painting on a visual medium of your choosing such as pens, colored pencils, paper mache, photo montage, computer graphics, etc. For this first part, find some way to bring it to class—the most obvious would be to take a photo and attach it to the second part of this assignment, which is turning back and reflecting in words the processes you went through to turn the verbal medium into a visual one. Don’t be afraid of your visual talents or lack thereof—the idea is to have you reflect on your thought processes and compare the powers and limits of the visual and the verbal.
So in words discuss the processes you went though and what you can learn about Ishmael’s processes through this. What kinds of inferences can you make about how Ishmael’s mind works: for example, how do his emotions relate to his more rational thought processes? How does his syntax, diction, imagery enter into what he’s observing and trying to puzzle out?
You won’t be judged your artistic ability—there are reasons some of you are attracted to words—but the process you go though in doing this and what you learn from it is what counts. Don’t try to figure out his previous biography but rather what can you say about his mind works, how he approaches the unknown and the various ways he responds to it. How do your own experiences in help you figure out Ishmael’s mind set. What conclusions might you draw about how art—both visual and verbal—and what questions does this assignment raise in your own mind?
Interesting thought. I have not read Moby Dick for a long time, but all I really remember from that chapter is him sharing a bed with Queequeg. Passed by the painting then. My wife remembered the painting from the movie, though. Think I'd enjoy your class...