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Survey for Approaches to Teaching Melville’s Moby-Dick, second edition

This survey is designed to gather information about the methods and materials used by instructors when teaching Melville’s Moby-Dick. The purpose is to develop a new volume on the topic in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature.

Respondents are invited to provide concrete answers to the questions related to their teaching and are also encouraged to submit a proposal for a contribution to the volume. Proposals and survey responses are due 1 February 2026, after which the survey will no longer be available.

Please answer the questions on the form below and click Done when you are finished. If you wish to submit an essay proposal for the volume, please see item 18 at the end of the survey for requirements.

Thank you for helping in the development of this important project.
Personal information(Required.)
1. Describe the course or courses in which you have taught Melville’s Moby-Dick. Please indicate course title and type (e.g., survey of American literature, survey of world literature, undergraduate or graduate level, special-topics course, cross-listed or interdisciplinary course). Explain why you have selected Moby-Dick to teach in this course. If you teach some—but not all—of the work, discuss how you select the sections on which you focus.
2. Do you teach Moby-Dick in settings beyond the walls of the traditional university classroom (e.g., in a museum, on a ship, in a corrections facility, as part of a study abroad program)? If so, describe where you teach the novel, why, and how.
3. Do you teach Moby-Dick in a setting in which English is not your students’ first language? If so, what is the first language and what challenges do you face?
4. List the secondary materials (e.g., historical essays or documents, critical essays, theoretical essays, journal articles, scholarly books, films, podcasts) you consult in your preparation for teaching any of the courses listed above. For supplementary materials that are available online, please provide a URL, DOI, or appropriate search terms.
5. One of the challenges of teaching Moby-Dick is its length and complexity of language. How do you handle this challenge? Do you teach the whole novel? If so, how much time during the semester do you devote to the text, and what strategies do you use to help students navigate its length? If you only teach selections of the novel, which selections do you choose and why? How much time do you devote to these selections?
6. Do you find it useful to teach Melville’s novel paired with those of other authors? If so, with whose works, and why does the pairing work?
7. What kind of assignments have you designed for teaching Moby-Dick? Do you assign background or supplementary readings or audiovisual resources (e.g., websites, documentary films, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc.) to help your students situate the novel? If so, which ones? How do you incorporate them into your teaching of the work?
8. In what literary, social, historical, political, ideological, and cultural contexts do you place Moby-Dick when teaching the novel? How do you establish these contexts in your courses?
9. What aspects of Melville’s writing style or technique have you chosen to discuss in your teaching? Do you emphasize any particular literary or rhetorical devices? Any genres and their conventions?
10. What critical or theoretical approaches have you found particularly useful for teaching Melville’s works (e.g., political theory, feminism, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, race)? How do your students respond to or talk about these critical approaches?
11. What do you see as the most important topics in discussing Moby-Dick?
12. What specific classroom strategies and activities do you use that have been successful in engaging students with Moby-Dick?
13. What do your students find most interesting about Moby-Dick?
14. What do your students find most challenging, troubling, or controversial about Moby-Dick? How do you help them engage with these aspects of the text?
15. If you have taught the novel in this course multiple times, discuss if and how your students’ reactions to the novel have shifted over time. What changes have you noted (if any) regarding which elements of the novel they react most strongly to (positively or negatively)? What changes (if any) have you noted in how students tend to consume the novel (e.g., hard copy text, ebook, audiobook, etc.)?
16. Given these shifts, and shifts to your own reactions to or understandings of the novel, how has your teaching of the novel changed over time? What have you done differently in teaching Moby-Dick over time, and why?
17. What would you like to see in a volume on approaches to teaching Moby-Dick?
18. If you would like to propose an original essay for this volume, please submit the following items:
  • an abstract of no more than 300 words in which you describe your approach or topic and explain its usefulness for both students and instructors. The focus of your essay should be pedagogical, and the abstract should be as specific as possible.
  • a short CV

If you plan to quote from student writing in your essay, you must obtain written permission from the student. Proposed essays should not be previously published. Abstracts and CVs should be sent to the volume editors by 1 February 2026. Please send submissions as a Word file, comments, or queries to Eric Aronoff and Stephen Rachman at fastfishandloosefish2025@gmail.com. Send any supplemental materials (e.g., course descriptions, course plans, syllabi, assignments, bibliographies, or other relevant documents) as separate PDF attachments.

Because we value your privacy, we want to make sure you have choices about how your responses are used. Please take a minute to let us know how we should treat your information.
Can we quote your responses anonymously in the published volume?(Required.)
Do you wish to have your name and institution included in the list of survey participants in the published volume?(Required.)
Would you be willing to be contacted by the volume editors about proposing an essay?(Required.)
If you wish to receive a copy of your responses or to have your responses deleted, please contact scholcomm@mla.org.