Activity: Academic and Industrial events › Conference, workshop or symposium
Description
This paper explores moments of exchange and transition between the human and seaweed that occur regularly across Herman Melville’s works. Such moments, I argue, give Melville opportunities not merely to imagine the destabilising of the distinction between human and nonhuman worlds. But, moreover, to reflect on isolation and dereliction, and on being cut-off from various worlds of culture. By turning to the relatively subdued but persistent interest Melville’s body of work exhibits in seaweed, I want to propose we may construct an ecopoetics of loneliness, one that illustrates the importance of drift, not rootedness, to society
Period
20 May 2022
Event title
'A darkness in the dark water': En-tangled approaches to seaweed