Moby-Dick (Video)

Steady your sea legs.

  • Course Length: 1 week
  • Course Type: Short Course
  • Category:
    • Literature
    • English
    • Humanities
    • Video
    • High School

Schools and Districts: We offer customized programs that won't break the bank. Get a quote.

Get a Quote

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: it's one of the heftiest American novels ever written, and one that instills a deep fear in the bones of readers. This massive, tough novel about a massive, tough whale stirs up a tsunami of musings on God, morals, revenge, and madness—all mixed in with more blood and guts than a Tarantino movie.

Sounds like a shipwreck waiting to happen.

Rather than fleeing the storm, we here on the Unsinkable Ship Shmoop are taking a full-throttle stab at Moby-Dick. (We're talking about the book here, not the whale.) We're trimming the blubber and gunning it through the choppy seas with an eight-lesson video course.

The videos, quizzes, and fishy humor will save you from your drowning and help you:

  • grasp how a whaling adventure story is also about fate, revenge, morals, and religion.
  • untangle the insane amount of interconnected oceanic and religious symbols and metaphors.
  • pick apart the weird narrative forms and random whale-speak that Melville throws at you, cause it's not just for funsies.
  • wrap your head around the cool points that Melville's trying to make about characters like Ishmael, Ahab, Queequeg, and Elijah.

Unit Breakdown

1 Moby-Dick (Video) - Moby-Dick

We're taking the plunge and tackling a gigantic novel with eight video lessons:

  • Call Me...Maybe?
  • All About Blubber
  • Elijah's Prophecies
  • Oh Captain! My Captain!
  • Paranormal Activity
  • All About Religion
  • It's All About Quee
  • The Shapeshifting Novel

So sit back and relax. No seasickness allowed.

*No whales were harmed in the making of this course.