Avast! Moby Dick & the Scales of Natural History | Julia Mueller | First Friday Lecture

How big can a book be, and what does it take to write one as vast as the ocean itself? In this First Friday lecture hosted by the University of Chicago Graham School, Basic Program instructor Julia Mueller argues that natural history is Herman Melville's primary resource for achieving the enormous scale of Moby-Dick. The novel's plot — Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the white whale — has the concentrated shape of a tragedy. It is everything else that Melville makes integral to the book that alters its scale: the digressive chapters on whale anatomy, the scenes of labor at sea, the meditations on ocean and sky that no plot summary can hold. Mueller traces how Melville draws on nineteenth-century natural history to imagine times, spaces, and forms of attention that exceed any single human life. The lecture places Moby-Dick in conversation with two contrasting visions of nature. Emerson's "face of nature," harmonious, legible, fitted to the human eye, gives Ishmael a language he both inherits and gradually undoes. The whale's facelessness refuses the Emersonian picture, pushing Melville toward Darwin: an inhuman ocean in which identity dissolves. Figures like Pip, abandoned at sea, register what it costs to encounter that vastness. Mueller then widens the frame through Lyell's deep time, Darwin's biological timescales, and Chakrabarty's Anthropocene, asking what kinds of attention the novel demands from contemporary readers. Key questions explored in this lecture: 1. How does Melville use natural history to achieve the vast scales he claims for the novel, beyond the concentrated plot centered on Ahab? 2. In what ways do Emerson's and Darwin's different "faces of nature" alter our sense of what natural history means in Moby-Dick? 3. How do the natural history chapters and digressions resist reducing the novel to a single whaling plot? 4. What connections emerge between Darwin, Lyell, the Anthropocene, and industrial whaling when read through Ishmael's experience at sea? 5. How might attention to suffering, wonder, and description in Moby-Dick shape our response to the novel's whales today? Chapters 00:00:00 Welcome and Basic Program Introduction 00:04:22 Lecture Begins: Moby-Dick, Whales, and the Problem of Scale 00:08:19 Argument: Natural History as Melville's Resource for Scale 00:13:41 What Is Natural History? Emerson, Darwin, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts 00:21:02 Ishmael, Personification, and Reading the Face of Nature 00:28:21 Dreadful Divinity, Indifferent Oceans, and the World Beyond the Human 00:34:12 The Whale in Excess of the Plot: Natural History Chapters and the Vortex 00:41:28 Loss of Identity, Lyell, and Darwin's Expansion of Scale 00:45:13 Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene, and Humans as a Geophysical Force 00:49:32 Industrial Whaling, "Save the Whales," and the Last Whale Scene 00:53:39 Q&A: Emerson, Darwin, and Natural History in Moby-Dick 01:00:01 Q&A: Myth, Natural History, and Ishmael as Narrator 01:07:57 Closing Thanks and Applause About the Speaker Julia Laurel Mueller is an essayist and scholar of poetry and poetics, natural history, film, observation and attention. She earned a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2021. Her scholarship focuses on the poetics of observation and attention—how perception of the natural world is translated into literary form. About the Basic Program The First Friday Lecture series is presented by the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. The Basic Program is a four-year certificate program for intellectually curious learners who want to read and discuss the Great Books in a serious, welcoming community. Through close reading and weekly conversation, students engage works of literature, philosophy, history, and social thought by authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, de Tocqueville, Woolf, and Morrison—guided by outstanding instructors, with no prerequisites, tests, papers, or grades. Offered online and in person, the program invites adults from all backgrounds to deepen their thinking, broaden their perspective, and join a lifelong community of readers. Learn more at https://graham.uchicago.edu/program/basic-program-of-liberal-education/ About Graham The Graham School is a one-of-a-kind intellectual community that brings the best of the University of Chicago to lifelong learners who are seeking discovery and discernment. Through an array of distinctive programs and courses in the Great Books, the liberal arts, and advanced leadership, we welcome learners who seek to deepen their understanding of the world and lead examined lives of purpose. Learn more at https://graham.uchicago.edu