68. To Read Moby Dick, with Mark Cirino

Mark Cirino, our guest for this episode of On the Dogwatch, claims that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is the greatest work of the imagination of any American. Ever. That’s the hot take for you, and if you have an object of artistic expression that is your favorite, or you think is the best of all time, this is your opportunity to hold it up against Moby Dick and make your own assessment.

Mark is Professor of English and Department Chair of English at the University of Evansville. Mark previously joined the podcast to discuss Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and today returns to help us consider the adventures of Ishmael, Ahab, and the  White Whale. To keep up the image of an English professor–especially because we can’t see his pipe and tweed jacket–Mark starts with teaching us a new vocabulary word: synecdochically. In this mini-lesson, Mark helps us understand a user-friendly way to get into a book like Moby Dick by taking one piece, in this case a single chapter, and to use that as a device to understand the whole. 

In our conversation, we discuss different ways of getting into Moby Dick, how the text has new things for even those who have read it many times, the value in simply reading or listening to the book and getting what you can for the first time. The insight of the fact that each of the 135 chapters is only a page or two, and the value of taking one or two chapters at a time and considering it rather than seeing it as a narrative you read through directly.