Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schmitt, Cannon

Titel

On the Sea

Ist Teil von

• Victorian review, 2010-10, Vol.36 (2), p.20

Ort / Verlag

Edmonton: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]their attention centres on that metonymy for, inversion of, and antidote to life on land, the ship. If such a perception aligns an ocean view with that "surface reading" that Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus extol in the introduction to their recent Representations special issue, "The Way We Read Now," we should not therefore neglect the once-inaccessible depths, the habitat of fantasmatic projections like Tennyson's kraken as well as actual but no less bizarre organisms dredged up from the abyssal plain in expeditions such as that of HMS Challenger, a naval survey vessel whose 1872-76 circumnavigation marks the advent of modern oceanography. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century image of the Tar awkwardly moving across dry land with bow legs and a rolling gait registers this negatively: the sailor's characteristic maladaptation for life on solid surfaces implies the different posture and balance required at sea. [...]the most searching, rigorous, and productive scholarly approach in this area might be nothing other than a literalism of the sea.