Moby-Dick

The Cooperating Context Method

“…As an example Captain Ahab in "Moby Dick" appears to have things under control as he plans how to kill the white whale [8]. During the dream stage, the outline process has the tasks of selecting a secondary (bit) character, selecting the weakness of the monster, and selecting a location for the hero in where to battle the monster.…”

Introduction: oceanic studies

“…In the mutual process by which Ishmael and the men find their fingers beginning to ''serpentine and spiralize'' among the ''soft, gentle globules,'' producing a ''strange sort of insanity'' while bathing in ''that inexpressible sperm,'' literary critics have seen a vision of queer community and homosociality. 1 And yet an oceanic reading of the memorable passage that follows amplifies and extends the standard understanding of the chapter. If we think not just of the scene's nautical setting or conditions, but of the epistemological process by which forms of human or extra-human relation are dissolved and reconstituted in the fluid medium, then the modes of relation produced by sperm-squeezing extend into a register impossible to conceive of, much less occupy, while land-bound.…”

“…For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the 152 H. Blum intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. 2 In Ishmael's ''unwitting'' misperception of the state of his own bodily sovereignty Á the loss of his recognition of and control over his own appendages while bathing in sperm Á we see more than just a model of fluid forms of social or political behavior, the homosocialism or situational homosexuality of life at sea. The liquidity of the medium in fact bears a conceptual or theoretical charge, as the novel's vision of the crew members ''squeezing [them]selves into each other'' imagines oceanic forms of relation that burst the boundaries and fixed terms of land-based, heterosexual expectations encoded in stable, rigid categories such as ''the wife'' or ''the bed, the table, the saddle'' Á which Ishmael will come to find stifling and inadequate.…”

Becoming a special education teacher: Journey or maze?

“…There is no other way to learn, I believe. I felt as if chasing the sperm whale in Melville's (2008) novel Moby Dick. I was chasing an elusive perfection in my professional journey, and instead I realized that professional growth is found in the metaphor of the maze, in the paradoxical situation of being always imperfect, searching for an endless quest for becoming a better special education teacher, to make a small step in the maze of my professional growth.…”