FYS 113 Unlocking the American Identity: Moby-Dick
What’s the key to understanding the American experiment? Historical or political events? Ethnicity? Geography? Music, paintings, film? The premise of this FYS course is that the most enduring and important insights into our country are in a book written by someone who shares Centre’s 200th anniversary—an uncategorizable book that lay dormant until it was rediscovered on Centre’s 100th anniversary: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. After a quick sampling of some classic American writing and some minor Melville works (Typee, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” etc.) the class will discuss and vote on whether the anthropology, psychology, biology, sociology, mythology, metaphysics, drama, and ethics in that whale of a book define who we are as a people—past, present, and future—and show us how to live “the good life.” The class will include rollicking excerpts from Tristram Shandy and a whale boat “experience” on Herrington Lake.