Narrative Odysseys: Maritime Literature, Frontier Romance and Global Modernity from Camões to Coetzee (sole instructor)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2015

This course will explore the political problems and literary opportunities presented by the sea in archipelagic, transatlantic, and global anglophone narratives. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin developed the concept of the “chronotope” to describe the ways in which spatial environments shape our relationship to the world, unlocking (and foreclosing) patterns of experience that are reflected in the structure of fictional representation. The ocean represents a special kind of environment that is utterly distinct from and yet deeply resonant with the one we normally inhabit. It is the space of wandering and migration, profound loneliness and desolation, cowardice and heroism, disorienting cultural contact and exchange, radical instability and change; it is the space we associate with the origins and otherness of life, and thus also with life’s hidden mysteries and deepest secrets. In a globalized world, these concerns emerge as increasingly central to modern life, whether we begin our search for “modernity” in medieval Ireland, Renaissance Portugal or in our own 21st-century culture.

While we will begin with a genealogy of forms drawn from the Renaissance (The Lusiads, The Tempest), readings will focus primarily on the 18th- and 19th-century Anglo-American tradition from Smollett to Woolf by way of Melville, Twain, Stevenson, and Conrad, culminating in an excursion into the reaches below The Line with Verne and Coetzee. Supplemental readings in poetry will be available as appropriate, with a running undercurrent of Byron, who was the great Romantic poet of the sea, and Elizabeth Bishop. In the visual arts, we will examine the late-period seascapes of the Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner and perhaps a handful of films.

For a full description of the course, click here.