Reception studies: on canonization

THE BOOK’S CANONICAL STATUS LENDS IT “CULTURAL CAPITAL”
About ninety to ninety-five percent of the reviews on Amazon.com for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary edition of Moby-Dick are four to five stars out of five. These reviewers, of course, are mostly people who champion the book as a classic, a masterpiece, or “the great American novel.” –Jessica

Nearly all of the positive reviews ended in some sort of slightly cheezy line, such as “take my advice and pick this one up before you read anything else” (an unspecified reader), “don’t pass up the opportunity to read this amazing novel” (BuckMulligan "Andrew"), and “so, ‘Call Me Ishmael’, because I love this book” (RJ "screename254"). --Andrew

The anonymous reviews of Moby Dick included in the Norton Critical Edition are incredibly similar to the reviews on Amazon.com given that we are not entirely sure of the character and training of the reviewer. Amazon.com has one individual claiming to be in the 7th grade, which gives us a glance at the variety of people responding to the text. On a superficial level, the modern internet reviewers respond positively to the text where the older reviews are overwhelmingly negative. This leads me to believe that canonization of Moby Dick has impacted the way people respond to the text. –Maggie

The review of Moby-Dick from Amazon.com opens with the reviewer telling the reader…rather, ordering the reader of the review to “Forget everything you have heard or think you know about this book”. This presupposes that the person reading the review (hence forward simply referred to as the reader) has a bias/knowledge about the book before even having read the novel. . . that they are aware of the impact Moby-Dick has had on the world since its publication in the 19th century. . . . This need to (not so subtly) declare one’s reading of high-brow literature demonstrates where society places the importance of reading in a contemporary sense. That is to say, instead of reading simply for pleasure, reading solely for the right to say “Oh yes, I’ve read [insert classic/dense novel here]”. --Megan

The fact that Moby-Dick is still read in university, considered a ‘classic,’ and studied means that it has withstood the test of time, and squeaked by this the rest of the ‘classics, ’ but does not mean it is necessarily good. But what it does do is create dialogue and discussion about issues such as category and genre, and trouble these kinds of organizational thinking, and I think this is the bulk of what both the positive and negative responses to Moby-Dick are dealing with; does one believe or not believe that genre and category can and should be disrupted? Those who think not give negative reviews, those that think yes give positive reviews. --Levi

CANONIZATION CAN HAPPEN IN POPULAR CULTURE, NOT JUST THE CLASSROOM
Another trend I found within the Amazon reviews was the constant retelling of how the reviewer decided to even read the book. The most common motivation was mandatory reading for a class, naturally. One review from "neokalis" written in February, 2007 stood out to me as another reason one might read Moby Dick. "I became interested in Moby Dick after watching "Star Trek: First Contact." Toward the end of the movie Captain Picard refuses to let go of his anger with The Borg and another character compares him to Ahab. This leads to an emotionally charged moment where Picard quotes Ishmael, "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a [cannon], he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." Naturally, I had to look up the quote on the Internet, and in the process I began to read some comments and reviews about Melville's classic," (Amazon).
Popular culture has been using images from Moby Dick as one of the most iconic symbols of obsession and after seeing this over and over one might want to go to the source to better understand its origins. The cultural capital gained from having read it allows for many opportunities to show off given that Ahab and his whale are referenced everywhere from cartoons, web comics, and even as the name of a bar located in San Francisco. This phenomenon had not occurred at the time of writing, due to the poor reception of the novel and one of the major drives for people to patiently read didn't exist. Canonization of the text was one major change that opened up numbers of forced readers, but I think the greater change is the popularity of the iconic images of the novel. -Maggie