Melville

Harvard FAS

This course offers an introduction to and critical examination of Melville’s writings. Moby-Dick is the centerpiece of the course (and of Melville’s works, and arguably of 19th-century American literature). We devote five weeks to Moby-Dick. But we also read Melville’s first novel, Typee, a commercial success that made him famous; his magazine short fiction from the mid-1850s: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; “Jimmy Rose”; and the brilliant novella, Benito Cereno. In…