DONALD PEASE

ENGLISH

FAVORITE BOOK TO TEACH:

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

MUST-READ BOOK IN YOUR FIELD:

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

FAVORITE PLEASURE READ:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

CURRENTLY READING:

The Case of Peter Pan,by Jacqueline Rose

I have taught and re-read Moby Dick from the year I began teaching at Dartmouth in 1973. Nomattertheangleof vision I bring to Melville's rendering of his characters and events, I do not feel I have begun to do them justice. Passages like the following begin to explain the challenge Melville poses: "There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." But the gratification that arises from our shared need to respond to Melville's novel has continued to inspire me and two generations of Dartmouth students.

I return to Whitman's poetry whenever I need to renew my faith in the imagination's power to restore hope to the world. Whitman gratifies that need in lines such as: "I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep."

This past year I wrote a book on Dr. Seuss that spurred my desire to design a course in children's literature. In The Case of PeterPan Rose spells out the problems attending such a project-with unparalleled wit and insight.