Part I: Susan Scarf Merrell on How Women Read Moby-Dick (28m)

Canio's launched our 2023 Moby-Dick Marathon season with a talk on How Women Read Moby-Dick with writer/professor Susan Scarf Merrell. The talk is in three short videos. To SKIP intro start at 2:50.

Moby-Dick is the ”Everything Everywhere All at Once” of American literature, a supremely gripping look at the chaotic mixture of morality, integrity, othering, invading, care taking and love for both self and other that characterizes the American experience.

In other words, the book is everything that we are, and well worth the effort it takes to examine it.

The novel is about adventure and heroism, sure. But it’s also about relationship and human dynamics. Each trip through Moby-Dick is a trip deeper into our own self-awareness and understanding. That’s why every woman who loves literature should take the full trip at least once!

Merrell looks at how to tackle this challenging experimental novel, to find the woman’s vision in the woman-less world of the whaling ship. It’s there for the taking, and we hope you’ll join us.

Susan Scarf Merrell is an author and professor of creative writing at Stony Brook University. Merrell's novels include Member of the Family and Shirley: A Novel. Her short stories and essays have been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, The Writer's Chronicle, The Southampton Review, and The New Haven Review.

Our next event is April 20, 6pm. Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife in will bee in conversation with literary critic, Paul Bresnick. Register on zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regis...

The Moby-Dick Marathon is June 9-11. For more information or to sign up to read: www.caniosculturalcafe.org