Males, Melville, and Moby-Dick: A New Male Studies Approach to Teaching Literature to College Men

Abstract

The experience of males has rarely been conveyed, even in the great works of literature of the dead white men. Tales of heroic exploits are many, but few touch upon the depth of the male soul. With the decrease in male enrollment on college campuses, many sodden with gender studies ideology in the classroom and the campus, it is of growing importance to understand the best ways to teach young men. It is posited here that the work of Herman Melville, explicitly here his novel Moby-Dick, offers insight into the male experience in a way that is lacking in much of literature. Melville gave voice to the Erotic and numinous in the life of the everyday man. Here it is offered as an antidote to the sex-obsessed and misandric views of the contemporary humanities.