Moby-Dick is our American epic, and one of the most densely written books in our language. Melville’s tale of Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the White Whale “contains the cosmos,” as Harold Bloom writes; and he adds: “I would not change one sentence.”
This online preview of our upcoming Moby-Dick course with Basic Program instructor Lin Atnip. Atnip discussed Melville’s masterwork and some of the critical voices that will contribute to our reading in the course. For anyone who either loves Moby-Dick or is willing to discover it.
Lecturer bio:
Lin Atnip is a Tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe (on leave 2024-2025) and an Instructor in the Basic Program. She completed her PhD in 2019 in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and a postdoctorate in the Center for Humanities and Social Change at the University of California-Santa Barbara, focusing on the question of how we are educated to the conditions of modernity (especially modern crisis) through reading and reflecting on literature. Her first book, From Tragedy to Apocalypse in American Literature: Reading to Make Sense of Our Endings, was recently published by Lexington Books. She also writes fiction and poetry. Ms. Atnip joined the Basic Program in 2015.
