To be honest, I can see myself having some issues with this upcoming writing project. I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around the actual assignment itself. I think I’ve got it sorted out by now in the sense that I understand the objective of the assignment, however I call into question my method of accomplishing said task. To me, text is text; no matter where it is located. Luckily enough for me, I can disagree with Birketts right then and there, literally from the get-go, giving me an immediate thesis option. The trouble I see myself running into arises when I think about how I am going to go about doing that. I can’t exactly take up four pages simply saying, “words are the same words no matter where you put them – whether it’s on paper, a rock, a screen, a piece of papyrus leaf, or scribbled in chalk on a sidewalk – whatever they’re saying will always be the same.”
To remedy the problem I see on the horizon, I think I’m going to use a website called Moby-Dick, Summary and Analysis, located at http://www.bookrags.com/Moby-Dick. The reason I’m siding with this website is because it sort of reminded me of the Wikipedia example that we brought up in class which helped me to understand the actual assignment in the first place. The site is broken down into things like a summary analysis, various in depth theme discussions, objects, characters, style and quotes. It’s interesting because it’s almost a mini-english class on the novel.
I read Moby Dick last spring…all 997 pages of it, and my class spent about a month on the book. Not to discredit my English teacher in any way – but this site literally covers everything we discussed with him, and then some. It is instances like this, when an online text can really enhance the original such as is done here. With this particular example of an online reading, it in no way takes away from the words which were written on the page as Birketts would argue, however it helps to put it all into perspective once the book has been read. It is almost as though the pages offered by this site encourage the reader to step back and look at the book again from a different angle and with a more analytical eye on the entire piece.
My personal favorite part about this site is the page which contains various quotes of significance. Personally, one of my favorite parts of reading classics is stumbling upon that one line or that one phrase you’ve always heard associated with the book. For example, I’ve always known that the phrase, “Call me Ishmael.” came from Moby Dick, but until I read it, I never really understood what it was. To see a bunch of those quotes simply laid out in front of me instead of having to creep through 997 pages of text is a nifty little bonus available on this website as opposed to reading the whole book.
