The Aesthetics of the Undersea

The Aesthetics of the Undersea
Author: Margaret Cohen,Killian Quigley
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780429814372

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Among global environments, the undersea is unique in the challenges it poses – and the opportunities it affords – for sensation, perception, inquiry, and fantasy. The Aesthetics of the Undersea draws case studies in such potencies from the subaqueous imaginings of Western culture, and from the undersea realities that have inspired them. The chapters explore aesthetic engagements with underwater worlds, and sustain a concern with submarine "sense," in several meanings of that word: when submerged, faculties and fantasies transform, confronting human subjects with their limitations while enlarging the apparent scope of possibility and invention. Terrestrially-established categories and contours shift, metamorphose, or fail altogether to apply. As ocean health acquires an increasing share of the global environmental imaginary, the histories of submarine sense manifest ever-greater importance, and offer resources for documentation as well as creativity. The chapters deal with the sensory, material, and formal provocations of the underwater environment, and consider the consequences of such provocations for aesthetic and epistemological paradigms. Contributors, who hail from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, include scholars of literature, art, new media, music and history. Cases studies range from baroque and rococo fantasies to the gothic, surrealism, modernism, and contemporary installation art. By juxtaposing early modern and Enlightenment contexts with matters of more recent – and indeed contemporary – importance, The Aesthetics of the Undersea establishes crucial relations among temporally remote entities, which will resonate across the environmental humanities.

The Underwater Eye

The Underwater Eye
Author: Margaret Cohen
Publsiher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780691225524

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A rich history of underwater filmmaking and how it has profoundly influenced the aesthetics of movies and public perception of the oceans In The Underwater Eye, Margaret Cohen tells the fascinating story of how the development of modern diving equipment and movie camera technology has allowed documentary and narrative filmmakers to take human vision into the depths, creating new imagery of the seas and the underwater realm, and expanding the scope of popular imagination. Innovating on the most challenging film set on earth, filmmakers have tapped the emotional power of the underwater environment to forge new visions of horror, tragedy, adventure, beauty, and surrealism, entertaining the public and shaping its perception of ocean reality. Examining works by filmmakers ranging from J. E. Williamson, inventor of the first undersea film technology in 1914, to Wes Anderson, who filmed the underwater scenes of his 2004 The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou entirely in a pool, The Underwater Eye traces how the radically alien qualities of underwater optics have shaped liquid fantasies for more than a century. Richly illustrated, the book explores documentaries by Jacques Cousteau, Louis Malle, and Hans Hass, art films by Man Ray and Jean Vigo, and popular movies and television shows such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Sea Hunt, the Bond films, Jaws, The Abyss, and Titanic. In exploring the cultural impact of underwater filmmaking, the book also asks compelling questions about the role film plays in engaging the public with the remote ocean, a frontline of climate change.

Reading Underwater Wreckage

Reading Underwater Wreckage
Author: Killian Quigley
Publsiher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781350290020

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Presenting a novel and needed theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned fragments-the histories they tell, and the futures they presage-as junctures of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies, this book puts the environmental humanities, and particularly multispecies studies, in close conversation with literary studies, history, and aesthetic theory. Earth's oceans hold the remains of as many as three million shipwrecks, some thousands of years old. Instead of approaching shipwrecks as either artefacts or “ecofacts,” this book presents a third frame for understanding, one inspired by the material dynamism of sea-floor stuff. As they become encrusted by oceanic matter-some of it living, some inanimate-anthropic fragments participate in a distinctively submarine form of material relation. That relation comprises a wide, and sometimes incalculable, array of things, lives, times, and stories. Drawing from several centuries of literary, philosophical, and scientific encounters with encrustations-as well as from some of the innumerable encrusted “art-forms” that inhabit the sea floor- this book serves anyone in search of better ways to perceive, describe, and imagine submarine matters.

The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space

The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space
Author: Kimberley Peters,Jon Anderson,Andrew Davies,Philip Steinberg
Publsiher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 591
Release: 2022-07-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781351619660

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Invisible as the seas and oceans may be for so many of us, life as we know it is almost always connected to, and constituted by, activities and occurrences that take place in, on and under our oceans. The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space provides a first port of call for scholars engaging in the ‘oceanic turn’ in the social sciences, offering a comprehensive summary of existing trends in making sense of our water worlds, alongside new, agenda-setting insights into the relationships between society and the ‘seas around us’. Accordingly, this ambitious text not only attends to a growing interest in our oceans, past and present; it is also situated in a broader spatial turn across the social sciences that seeks to account for how space and place are imbricated in socio-cultural and political life. Through six clearly structured and wide-ranging sections, The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space examines and interrogates how the oceans are environmental, historical, social, cultural, political, legal and economic spaces, and also zones where national and international security comes into question. With a foreword and introduction authored by some of the leading scholars researching and writing about ocean spaces, alongside 31 further, carefully crafted chapters from established as well as early career academics, this book provides both an accessible guide to the subject and a cutting-edge collection of critical ideas and questions shaping the social sciences today. This handbook brings together the key debates defining the ‘field’ in one volume, appealing to a wide, cross-disciplinary social science and humanities audience. Moreover, drawing on a range of international examples, from a global collective of authors, this book promises to be the benchmark publication for those interested in ocean spaces, past and present. Indeed, as the seas and oceans continue to capture world-wide attention, and the social sciences continue their seaward ‘turn’, The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space will provide an invaluable resource that reveals how our world is a water world.

Maritime Animals

Maritime Animals
Author: Kaori Nagai
Publsiher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2023-08-31
Genre: Electronic Book
ISBN: 9780271096391

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Gothic in the Oceanic South

Gothic in the Oceanic South
Author: Diana Sandars,Allison Craven
Publsiher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2023-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781003829447

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This dynamic multidisciplinary collection of essays examines the uncanny, eerie, wondrous, and dreaded dimensions of oceans, seas, waterways, and watery forms of the oceanic South, a haunted global precinct stretching across the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans, and around Australasia, Oceania, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa. Presenting work from leading scholars, the chapters contend with the contemporary fears and repressions associated with the return of environmental traumas, colonial traumas, and the spectres of the precolonial deep past that resurface in the present. The book examines the manifestations of these Gothic aesthetics and propensities across a range of watery spaces – seas, oceans, waterholes, and swamps – in vessels, ports, shorelines, journeys, strandings, and transformations, in amphibious bodies and the drowned, all of which promote haunted engagement with the materiality of water. This collection renews the interdisciplinary breadth of Gothic criticism and the relevance of Gothic affect and sensibility to understanding the histories and cultures of the oceanic South through an exploration of the rarely considered uncanniness of the oceans, waterways, and aqueous forms of the Southern Hemisphere, haunted by colonial and precolonial imaginings of the Antipodes, the legacies of imperialism, and the “double vision” between Oceanic and settler-colonial epistemologies, and the encroaching menace of climate change. Comprising diverse contributions from screen, literary, and cultural studies, environmental humanities, human geography, and creative practice in ecological sound art, and poetry, the collection examines the uncanny and the sublime in watery fictions and authentic settings of a range of aqueous southern forms – ocean surfaces and depths, haunted shallows and reefs, moist mangroves, moss and lichen, the awesome horror of tidal apocalypse. This book will be illuminating reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and Indigenous studies.

Underwater Worlds

Underwater Worlds
Author: Will Abberley
Publsiher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781527525535

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Underwater Worlds throws open a new area in the emerging field of “blue” environmental humanities by exploring how subaqueous environments have been imagined and represented across cultures and media. The collection pursues this theme through various disciplinary perspectives and methodologies, including history, literary and film criticism, myth studies, legal studies and the history of art. The essays suggest that, since the nineteenth century, technologies of underwater exploration have generated novel sensory experiences that have destabilized conventional modes of representation and influenced new aesthetic forms from fiction and television to virtual reality. The collection also examines how representations of underwater environments have reflected and critiqued humans’ relationships with marine ecology and life-forms. It reflects on the deeper cultural and symbolic resonances of mythical figures such as mermaids, sea monsters and the ghosts of drowned seafarers. The contributions further reveal myriad political, ideological, gendered and racial dimensions of representing underwater environments.

Extinction and Religion

Extinction and Religion
Author: Jeremy H. Kidwell,Stefan Skrimshire
Publsiher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2024-01-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780253068491

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Human-caused extinctions have never been so prominent in our political and cultural landscape. Extinction and Religion is a collection of wide-ranging chapters that explore the implications for religious faith and experience as it relates to a "sixth mass extinction" in Earth's history. Further it seeks to answer the question as to how religious and spiritual practices are shaping responses to the crisis? Edited by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Stefan Skrimshire, this collection aims to set a new postsecular agenda, articulating the questions, challenges, and ways forward for thinking about religion in an age of mass extinction rather than provide responses from world religions in isolation. It covers subjects such as the multitude of challenges posed by mass extinction to beliefs about the future of humanity, death and the afterlife, the integrity of creation, and the relationship between human and nonhuman life. Wide ranging and incisive, Extinction and Religion amply demonstrates the many ways in which the threat of extinction profoundly affects our faith and religious life worlds.