Narrative Odysseys: Maritime Literature, Frontier Romance and Global Modernity from Camoes to Coetzee
Fall 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.
Our reading will consider a number of ocean-based environments (the voyaging ship, the island, the shore, the coast, the river, the underwater depths), character types (the quester, the castaway, the beachcomber, the marauder, the explorer, the megalomaniac), countries (England, Scotland, America, France, South Africa), regions (the Mediterranean, the Commonwealth, the Hemisphere), and narrative structures through the lens of the chronotope. We will try to understand how these elements shape the form of the novel, with limited attention to narrative poetry. The question of genre will be explored through a variety of seafaring genres (epic and quest romance; utopian, historical and science fictions; young adult literature, adventure tales and fantasy) and literary forms (ethnography and travel narrative, short story and novella, classic novels). 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.
Secondary readings will introduce students to classic works of narrative theory and literary criticism, as well as Marxist political theory and ecological perspectives. We will situate our inquiry into maritime literary culture within contemporary debates concerning philosophy and philology, cultural mobility and encounter, sovereignty and the state of exception, the critique of political economy and empire, postcolonialism and the contestation of the ‘canon.’ Critical readings may include: Mikhail Bakhtin, Northrop Frye, Claudio Guillén, Hans Blumenberg, Fredric Jameson, Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ronald Paulson, J. Hillis Miller, Deidre Lynch, Ian Duncan, Peggy Kamuf, Marianne DeKoven, Jonathan Arac, Sacvan Bercovitch, Derek Attridge, Tim Morton, and Margaret Cohen.