ENG 304: Melville & Ellison

The bulk of our introduction to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is experienced in Chapter one of the novel in which our protagonist himself is thrust into a strange and uncomfortable…

Ahab’s monologue in the chapter “The Sphynx” is one of the few chances we as readers are able to witness this curious captain in a raw and emotional state. Within…

The action of naming an animal is interesting to consider within the context of Melville’s Moby Dick. In the chapter “The Affidavit”, we as readers are told that there are…

Though a majority of Herman Melville’s readers have found the Cetology chapter of his novel Moby Dick to be unnecessarily long and tedious, I thoroughly enjoyed both his comical take…

I found Jill Lepore’s lecture on the secret history of Wonder Woman to be both intriguing and enlightening. I hadn’t realized how complex and historical Wonder Woman was to America…

The collected essays of Ralph Ellison give us as readers insight into the mind of this historical American writer. Specifically in the essays assigned for Friday, we were able to…

Though separated by over a century, Herman Melville’s poem Clarel and Justin Simien’s movie Dear White People prove to have similar underlying themes. Melville’s poem follows an American man named…

Herman Melville’s poem Shiloh is a written representation of the Battle of Shiloh that was fought in April 1862 in southwestern Tennessee. As we discussed in class, this battle marked…

After completing Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, many of the reader’s questions and suspicions are finally resolved in the last few pages of this short yet compelling story. There is…

During class on Wednesday, we discussed our reception of Tommo as the main character in Herman Melville’s Typee. As readers, we are able to sympathize with Tommo’s unfortunate situation as…