Upcoming Symposia

Widely considered the book with which the very notion of the great American novel originated, Moby Dick is a vast, sprawling, ambitious work as relevant to the question of what it means to be an American today as it was expressive of the American Spirit when it was first written. Alongside such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Emerson, and Thoreau, Melville showed the world that America had given birth to a literary tradition as rich and nuanced as the European world from which it sprang.

Perhaps the most frequently overlooked and unappreciated quality of Moby Dick (certainly forgotten or never noticed by those who last read it in high school or college) is how profoundly funny the book is. Alongside the unquenchable philosophic curiosity of our narrator Ishmael, the adventurous spirit of heroic Queequeg, and the demonic monomaniacal obsession of Captain Ahab, runs a constant theme of irony and humor which was to serve as model and inspiration for such great American comic writers as Mark Twain and James Thurber.

Far more than “a book about whales,” Moby Dick is an unprecedented blend of the political and the spiritual, the economic and the philosophic, the adventurous and the contemplative, such as only an American writer could produce—and the Pequod aboard which the unforgettable characters we meet between its pages sail is the original “melting pot” which came to characterize the United States in the decades to come.

The Symposium will run from September 2027 to February 2028. Cost is $600 for the full series. Participation by invitation only. For more information, please contact the Academic Director here.