Moby Dick by Herman Melville is a foundational work of the American canon that has been read, reread, and taught for decades now. It is a timeless narrative that explores transcendentalism, class, power, religion, and the natural world while also questioning what it means to be educated, American, and even human. Most importantly, it’s a text about the art of reading, how to read, and the process of reading the world around you. Ishmael models this form of reading throughout the novel, not only by observing people and animals, but also by treating the world itself as a text, reading the markings on Queequeg’s body and the engravings on the whale’s back. Thus insinuating that books are not the only way to read and learn, and that knowledge comes in many forms.
This led me to question: Does form affect content? Or, in other words, does the medium through which information is delivered shape the way we comprehend and emotionally engage with it? In this scholarly analysis, I will be interrogating different textual media of the same novel, Moby Dick, to examine their scale, interface, design choices, and how these all work together to tell their own story. To do this, I will be investigating a limited edition Arion Press artist book, a classic codex, and a PDF online version, exploring how these adaptations affect my reading experience, emotional response, and absorption of the text.
Trinity,
Great explanation of how you understand the novel and plan to address the form of its content: “Moby Dick by Herman Melville is a foundational work of the American canon that has been read, reread, and taught for decades now. It is a timeless narrative that explores transcendentalism, class, power, religion, and the natural world while also questioning what it means to be educated, American, and even human. Most importantly, it’s a text about the art of reading, how to read, and the process of reading the world around you.” And “Thus insinuating that books are not the only way to read and learn, and that knowledge comes in many forms.”
I think your question is already answered, especially by this class: of course, form affects content, and especially the reading of content. I think what you’re actually suggesting is something about “comparative textual media”—see my book with Hayles– but, I’m also not sure that’s what you were really after here, as I thought you wanted to do a deep dive on the particular edition of the novel: the limited edition Arion Press book. (It is not an artist book).
I think what you’re proposing here is far too subjective to be an analytical essay; “exploring how these adaptations affect my reading experience, emotional response, and absorption of the text.” Instead, you need a reason to either dive deeper into the biography of the book from your midterm OR do an analytical study comparing a few selected examples of versions of this novel through the lens of comparative textual media. OR, a different way of going about it would be to do research on scholarship about different editions and adaptations of the novel, using your midterm biography of a book as a starting point for considering how to think capaciously, comparatively, and critically about editions (think, bibliographic studies) via the novel Moby-Dick.
I hope this helps. Think a bit more about what you want to do, and then send me a revised thesis draft. Good start!