• Screenshot from "In the Heart of the Sea"

    Read the book. See the movie. Take the Dartmouth online course.

    Tuesday, December 22, 2015
    News Type

This holiday season make your trip to the theater come to life through DartmouthX. In the Heart of the Sea, now playing in movie theaters across the country, tells the true story of the whale that inspired Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick. The film is based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s book of the same name.

Moby Dick is widely regarded as the ‘Great American Novel.’ Yet Melville’s epic is so filled with esoteric symbols and allegories that few readers realize it was actually inspired by a true story,” says Don Pease, the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and professor of English.

Professor Pease, along with Lecturer of English Jed Dobson, will lead a free online course on “The American Renaissance: Classic Literature of the 19th Century” beginning February 16, 2016. Join them to explore the works of famous American authors like Herman Melville as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. As part of the course, you’ll examine the historic role Dartmouth College played in fostering the American Renaissance. 

“We hope that Dartmouth alumni, especially those who have taken an American literature course in the past from Bill Cook, Blanche Gelfant, Jim Cox, and Lou Renza, will join us this winter to learn more about this classic book as well as several other classics of the American Renaissance,” says Dobson. “We are offering this course not only to the Dartmouth students here in Hanover, but also online to all Dartmouth alumni in their own homes through DartmouthX.”

Ready to dive in? Watch a video about the DartmouthX course, then register. The course begins February 16, 2016, but you can get a head start on the course readings.

You can also follow along on:

Twitter: @amrenxdartx
Facebook: /amrenxdartx
Instagram: /amrenxdartx
Online: amrenx.dartmouthx.org