We study a handful of Melville's many novels, short stories, and poems. Characteristic topics include cultural relativism, the nature of the universe, slavery, the bachelor (the man of naïve ""half-vision""), paradise lost and regained, the monomaniac, feminist issues, and Transcendentalism as a movement and an epistemology. Additionally, we consider aspects of Melville's prose style and techniques involving symbolism and allegory.
Course credit exclusions: None.