All Program Dates
November 13, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
December 11, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
January 8, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
February 12, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
March 19, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
April 9, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Registration
Tuition for this course is $300. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
This course is now sold out.
If you are still interested in joining the waitlist, please email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
Description
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation and famous antagonist. Less well known are the novel’s unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, messy, and wondrous moments. Narrator Ishmael, along with the whaleship Pequod’s other “meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways,” are beguiled into joining Captain Ahab in his vengeful pursuit of the white whale that “dismasted” him. But along the way, Ishmael takes the reader on many a detour into varied ways of knowing. Moby-Dick brings outlandish curiosity to bear on the multitudinous, oceanic scale of our diverse world.
In this course, which welcomes first-time Melville readers and Moby-Dick obsessives alike, our discussions will range from the novel’s most thunderous, epic heights to its quirkiest, crudest jokes. What higher (or lower) powers are at play in the world? How do we come to knowledge? What do humans owe one another? What does a “heart-stricken moose” sound like? Is that really how sperm whales got their name? These and innumerable other questions are raised by Melville’s best-known work, and most readers come away from Moby-Dick with a new sense of how to navigate the oceanic vastness of our world. We will have the benefit drawing on the Rosenbach’s excellent Melville holdings in our discussions.
Prerequisites: intellectual generosity and openness to new ideas; inquisitiveness and comfort with unknowingness.
Preferred Text: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Oxford, 2022), ed. Hester Blum
Instructor
Hester Blum is Professor of English at Penn State. She is the editor of the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Moby-Dick and the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives and The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration, among other volumes. Blum is past president of the Herman Melville Society, and her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She participated in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world’s last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet, on which Melville sailed. Dr. Blum led a course on Moby-Dick for the Rosenbach in 2022-23.