Reception studies: Moby-Dick in the Information Age

DOES THE INTERNET GENERATION HAVE THE PATIENCE TO READ ENCYCLOPEDIC NOVELS?
With television and other media constantly bombarding people with fast moving images and short quick cuts it is no wonder they lose interest in a novel written in such a manner as Moby Dick. In a world with cell phones, GPS, myspace, and IPODS no one knows what is like to be isolated and have nothing but your thoughts to entertain you. There is a lack of understanding by some readers who immediately look for plot and moments of action as they are used to hour and forty five minute movies and thirty minute sitcoms. But even with this being said about modern society’s take on the novel it was still considered by many to be far too long when it was first written. This makes me think then that it is a misunderstanding of the encyclopedic novel on a whole. Without classic plot or character development many people don’t know how to read Moby Dick or search for meaning in it, so they find it boring and give up after the first 20 pages and deem it necessary to blame the length of the work for their misunderstanding. –Justin H.

Popular entertainment is direct and sensationalistic, directed toward people with busy lives, or short attention spans, perhaps. It is no wonder that readers such as this one would find Moby-Dick a drag. Melville expected that people would have to devote their time to understanding his method, yet the readers of today are more audiences (given the largeness of visual culture) who do not want their time taken from them. Splitting Moby-Dick into [two different books, as this reader suggested:] a concise tale of revenge against nature apart from a lengthy explanation of all its components would be much more convenient to these kinds of people, as the reviewer seems to indicate. There is disagreement between this person and the author about what encompasses a story. For the reviewer, and perhaps many audiences of visual culture today, a story is linear. –Jessica

Overall, I feel as though each of these young critics are struggling to 'get something' out of the novel. Furthermore by being a big undertaking the struggle is magnified through mere size and devotion of the novel. They want something in return for all of what they put into the novel, and obviously the digression on whiteness, or the Cetology discourse, is not what they are looking for. I’m not quite sure what this means for our culture as a hole, but I will say that I don’t see the encyclopediac book, even one with a rich history and high acclaim, playing a large part in the future of the literary world. –Michael W.

IF MELVILLE WAS REALLY SO AHEAD OF HIS TIME. . .
. . . after Melville’s works Typee and Omoo, he became known as an author of sexualized books, and he himself became known as a sex symbol. This idea of a “sex symbol” is different than that of our own. . . We think of sex symbols as the actors or musicians who grace the covers of tabloid magazines, their status mainly coming from their bodies, not as much as their bodies of work. In Melville’s time, he seems to have gained the reputation more from his mind than his body (which seems hilarious to think about, even if I have never seen a picture of him). Who considers author’s sex symbols? --Sophia

I feel as though the more interesting question here would be what if Moby-Dick was released now? Is it that the present critics of literature understand the processes, the styles and the idea of ‘literacy’ better than the critics of the 19th century? Would MD still be the one-true whale narrative it has been for centuries? How would critics connect Melville to his text if it were released today? . . . Moby-Dick would find itself in a grouping of inconsequential novels, probably thrown away for fifty years, just like it was when it was actually published. In a time of post-modernism and memoir fiction, MD would come out as a rambling whaling narrative that would not peak interest of a present day reader. –Danny