The John Adams Institute presented a two day course at Boekhandel Van Rossum on Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby-Dick, taught by George Blaustein, associate professor at the University of Amsterdam. Grand, strange, sometimes nonsensical, occasionally prophetic, and funnier than you expect, Moby-Dick is as subtle as a sledgehammer and yet as elusive as vapor.
Why do we treat it with such reverence? Why is it the “great American novel”? Why do we need a great American novel at all? And what did Moby-Dick mean in its own time and what should it mean in ours?
