Scholarly Contribution · 2023
Better Learning through Plastic?
The Moby-Duck Saga and Pedagogy
Chapter 14 in Plastics, Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste
Abstract
Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea (2011) begins with a simple and almost absurd premise: a cargo container of plastic bath toys falls overboard in the North Pacific and drifts, for years, across the world’s oceans. What unfolds is anything but simple. Part travelogue, part environmental reportage, part Melvillian meditation on obsession and the sea, the book traces not only the physical journey of the toys but the invisible infrastructures — petrochemical, economic, ecological — that brought them into being and will outlast every human who touched them.
This chapter argues that Moby-Duck offers literature instructors a rare and valuable pedagogical instrument: a work capacious enough to carry students across disciplinary borders while remaining genuinely, compulsively readable. Drawing on the traditions of American nature writing and the emerging field of ecocriticism, the chapter examines how Hohn’s narrative reframes plastic not as neutral background matter but as a cultural artifact freighted with meaning — a material embodiment of consumer capitalism, petromodernity, and the normalized externalizing of cost onto natural systems and future generations.
Through close attention to the text’s rhetorical strategies, its allusions to Moby-Dick, and its movement between scientific precision and lyric inquiry, this chapter demonstrates how Moby-Duck invites students to develop what might be called plastic literacy: the capacity to read ordinary objects as participants in complex, often troubling, global narratives. The classroom, this chapter contends, is precisely the space where such literacy must be cultivated — and literature, at its most purposeful, is the means.
Gessell came to Moby-Duck the way many great teachers come to their best texts — through students. The book’s uncanny ability to hold a room, to make the invisible visible, made it a natural anchor for her environmental literature courses at UNG. This chapter is the scholarly distillation of years of classroom experience: what it looks like when the right book meets the right moment, and what it asks of the instructor willing to follow it wherever it leads.
Literature is not decoration but instrument — a way of knowing the world precisely when the world has become difficult to face.— Donna A. Gessell
Better Learning through Plastic?: The Moby-Duck Saga and Pedagogy
Situated in the volume’s final section alongside chapters on ecopoetics and literary approaches to waste, this contribution grounds abstract questions about petroculture and environmental crisis in the lived pedagogical experience of the literature classroom.
The Volume
Plastics, Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste
The first comprehensive scholarly study of plastics from invention to present, this award-winning edited collection brings together perspectives from across the humanities to examine plastic as cultural, political, and environmental phenomenon — tracing its rapid incorporation into modern life and its toxic invasion of natural environments and human bodies.
Featuring eighteen chapters organized across four parts — Plastic Lives, Plastic Proliferation, Plastics in Art, and Plastics in Literature — the volume draws on history, art, literature, and environmental science.
View at Edinburgh University Press →About the Author
Donna A. Gessell is Professor Emerita of English at the University of North Georgia, where she taught courses in literature, linguistics, and writing across a distinguished career. Her scholarly work encompasses ecocriticism, environmental literature, and the relationship between language, culture, and ecological crisis.