Moby-Dick and Marilynne Robinson [Liza Birnbaum]

All Levels | Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, is a slim book about two young women growing up in a Northern Idaho town—a scope and premise strikingly unlike Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Why, then, was Robinson’s working title for the manuscript “Moby-Jane”? In this class, we’ll read Moby-Dick and Housekeeping, paying close attention to their affinities and considering how both writers’ lyric language, vivid description, and what Robinson calls the “spectacular exploration of the metaphorical acts of consciousness” might influence our own work.