A Snug-Fitting Coffin Lid: One Student's Artistic Response to Queequeg

AE Schlachter - Leviathan, 2003 - muse.jhu.edu
AE Schlachter
Leviathan, 2003muse.jhu.edu
ABBY E. SCHLACHTER encountered Melville's Moby-Dick as a sophomore student at
Northern Kentucky University, enrolled in an Honors course that examined the. novel and its
impact on contemporary art. It should be pointed out that I signed up for this semester-long
foray because I enjoyed the teaching style of Dr. Wallace, our fearless leader, not for any
burning desire to learn more about harpooning. In fact, I was secretly dreading reading the
book. I was not, by any means, deluding myself into believing this was a feminine novel …
ABBY E. SCHLACHTER encountered Melville’s Moby-Dick as a sophomore student at Northern Kentucky University, enrolled in an Honors course that examined the. novel and its impact on contemporary art. It should be pointed out that I signed up for this semester-long foray because I enjoyed the teaching style of Dr. Wallace, our fearless leader, not for any burning desire to learn more about harpooning. In fact, I was secretly dreading reading the book. I was not, by any means, deluding myself into believing this was a feminine novel. Even the whale had a decidedly masculine name. Dr. Wallace had peaked my curiosity, and the facl that this class was offered as an Honors course persuaded me. I enjoyed this different learning style, in which a small group of students (at most a dozen per class) gathered around a table to discuss what we were learning, rather than being preached to by a professor at the front of the room. I also appreciated how Dr. Wallace blended disciplines; in the course I had taken previously with him, Freshman Honors Literature, what we read would coincide with trips to the Symphony, art museums, and so on. At the time I was a Fine Arts major, and believed if anyone could help me read Moby-Dick, it would be Dr. Wallace and his presentation of contemporary art. Before long Dr. Wallace recognized some sort of potential in our little group and threw the syllabus out the window, leaving our foray into Moby-Dick entirely up to us. While we did study other artists, we were encouraged to become artists ourselves, taking our private responses to the novel and turning them into something public and tangible. Our assignment became simple-read the novel, then make something by the end of the semester.
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