A Marathon of 135 Chapters and an Epilogue
Reading “Moby-Dick” as Public Performance and Literary Heritage Event
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/8562Keywords:
literary tourism, reading marathon, public performance, Moby-DickAbstract
In a way, Moby-Dick occupies a special place in American literary history and popular imagination. Seemingly cursory references to the difficulty or failure to read Moby-Dick abound in American popular culture, ranging from such diverse cultural media as cartoon series to films. M. Thomas Inge calls Moby-Dick “the great unread American novel,” thus echoing a widespread notion that the novel is hard to read and therefore not widely read. This article investigates Moby-Dick not so much in its capacity as a novel that is “unread” by the individual but rather as a piece of literature at the center of a collective act of reading. So-called Moby-Dick reading marathons, organized at various locations along the American East and West coasts, ultimately turn the novel into a performance and into a visitor attraction. Unlike more conventional sites of literary tourism where the author’s house and biography lure tourists, these marathons are a form of literary tourism in which the text itself figures centrally. Framed by diverse event programs and sometimes connected to living history, with a Melville impersonator present, these marathons, by inviting visitors to take turns reading the novel publicly, transform the notoriously challenging novel Moby-Dick into an interactive, participatory literary heritage event.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
RSAJournal applies a CC BY-NC-ND license to all its contributions. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
- BY: credit must be given to the creator.
- NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
- ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights for their submissions to the journal.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share unedited work for non-commercial purposes with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.