Volume 73, Issue 2 - Thematic issue on “Writing Water in Classical American Literature”; Guest Editors: Caroline Rosenthal and Kerstin Knopf

This article explores two canonical American novels, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), as explorations of the relationship between American literary culture and oceanic space. The tools and methodologies of the Blue Humanities enable these two novels to reveal how the physical and symbolic structures of the ocean shape the ambitions and efforts of American literature. In specific detail, the contribution takes up submersion and buoyancy as threat and promise. The threat of submersion appears in the near-drowning of Pip in Moby-Dick . The contrasting fantasy of pure buoyancy shows itself through the prospective retirement of Pynchon’s heroes along an imaginary “Atlantick Line” in Mason & Dixon . Both writers and both episodes demonstrate the deep intimacy between American fictions and blue spaces.

This article introduces the method of ‘crossmapping’ to the Blue Humanities and shows how, by focusing on thematic and aesthetic functions of water, widely different texts can be brought into dialogue without presupposing a direct line of influence. Aquatic crossmapping can reveal cultural paradigms that transcend time, geography, and cultural contexts, as well as help chart the varied affordances of water itself. As a case study, this article crossmaps two US American novels almost two centuries apart: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Emma Cline’s The Guest (2023). Despite Melville’s novel being among the most adapted works of American fiction, The Guest is in no way hypertextually related to it. Yet, remarkable parallels become discernable by honing in on water in both of the texts: water’s deceptive promise of sanctuary, its function as a source and marker of capital, as well as its constituting the identity of both novels’ protagonists.

This article reads Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers through a Blue Humanities perspective. It shows how Thoreau’s first book derives its narrative structure, language, and ideas from wet matter and how the river turns into an epistemic tool: Floating down river, Thoreau explores the palimpsestic history of human settlement on its banks, but increasingly entrusts himself to the narrative agency of the river itself. Land-based epistemologies and ontologies gradually give way to thinking through and being on water. As I will demonstrate, Thoreau uses buoyancy to explore how nature’s temporality, ecosystems, and indigeneity differ from the orders and laws of civil settlement. In addition, the river becomes a reservoir for watery syntax and expressions: In its means and manner of representation, the text imitates the river’s flow and formations, the shape and movements of its riparian flora, and the activities of the multitude of animals living in, on, and by the water.

Attica Locke’s crime fiction novels, set in the eastern Texas region, bring the ambivalences of wetland regions together with the troubling histories of the US South. In this contribution, I center two of Locke’s works from the “Highway 59” series, Black Water Rising (2009) and Bluebird, Bluebird (2017), to explore the ways they draw on the epistemological indeterminacies of wetland regions. I situate these findings within the conventions of genre – of mysteries and murders that need solving – as well as within contexts saturated by racism and structures of neoliberal exploitation that go beyond simple resolution. At the edges of the spaces of Blue Humanities, and yet anything but marginal in contemporary considerations of environmental crises, wetlands prove to be a fascinating site for troubling all kinds of knowledges.

This article discusses how John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez  (1951) represents marine biology research during Steinbeck and Ricketts’s expedition into the Gulf of California in 1940. It looks at their research methods, their understanding of ecology through marine biological systems, and their interrelation with the tides that structured their routine and influenced their thought and text. The article intertwines ecocritical and Blue Humanities approaches, while analyzing the connection between ocean, marine life, tides, science, ecology, and text. The article further looks at how Steinbeck’s text is instrumental in the development of ecological consciousness and environmentalism in the USA.