Reading Response Prompts
 

These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read, and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any one of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Do not, however, attempt to answer multiple prompts for any assignment. If you choose to pursue an idea of your own or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. For more information, review the listserv assignment.
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, Chapters 100-124

Our penultimate reading focuses heavily on Ahab. We get both more of his thoughts and more of his interactions with other men, both on the Pequod and from other ships. Consider — or reconsider — Ahab in the light of these chapters.

Ishmael tells us early in the book (in Chapter 26, “Knights and Squires”) that Starbuck, despite his many forms of excellence, “cannot withstand those more terrific because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man” (97). Consider Starbuck in these chapters, both in terms of his own character and his vulnerability to Ahab’s rage and might.

Again you have the option to take any passage from this reading and re-lineate it as poetry. The instructions are the same: you must not change anything about it except where the line-breaks occur. You must keep the same words in the same sequence and maintain the same punctuation. If you want to add capitalization at the beginnings of lines, you may, though this is not required. As part of your post, you must also explain why you chose the passage you did (presumably, you found it poetic already, though you should explain why) and how you approached reforming it into a poem.

 
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