Inferno study links
List of Dante resources on the interwebs
The Digital Dante Project at Columbia
fall semester units
Unit One: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
Unit Two: Dante’s Inferno
Unit Three: Moby-Dick, Chapters 1-22
Unit Four: Lyric Poetry 1
Unit Five: Short Fiction 1
Unit Six: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Unit Seven: Moby-Dick, Chapters 23-46
“But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
and, with this light, received what it had asked.
Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—by
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
due DATES
syllabus
cyclical vocabulary and sentence composition assignment
CURRENT TEXTs TO HAVE DAILY
Moby-dick central
Click for full reading schedule and assignments
You’re undertaking the reading of the greatest work of American fiction and one of the world’s greatest works of art. It’s a project that’ll span the entirety of the year, completing the reading outside of class and in addition to your other regular assignments. It’s an undertaking to read this novel, to be sure, but it need not be arduous if you’re disciplined.
An undertaking, yes, but that does not mean you should simply set it down and walk away when you hit a tough or a boring chapter. It’s a rewarding book to those who work the hardest and put in the time it requires. This section of the course page provides you the tools you’ll need to work the novel through to its completion.
Here is a handy document you might consider printing and having with you while you read: Allusions in Moby-Dick
You may find it useful to use the audio recordings from The Big Read; each chapter has a special guest reading it. Listening along will help, especially at the beginning. The readers are (mostly) excellent at capturing the tone of each chapter. As you read, seek out and consider the following concepts:
Water meditations and man's attraction to water, Ishmael's curiosity about and tolerance for human motivation, The quest, The nature of God and man, Finding and losing the self (Narcissus), Parallels between land and sea, Civilization and "savagery", cannibalism, Biblical echoes and references: Jonah, Job, Ahab, Elijah, Ishmael, etc., Monomania and madness, the value of religion, the value of community
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”