Description
'Towards a French Romantic Hydrocommons'My paper was part of a special Bristol delegate panel entitled 'Material and Imaginary Waters'. We asked: how do artists working with print and visual media imagine our relationship to water, and in what ways can such representations of water foster new modes of understanding about ourselves and the world in which we live? These broad questions form the starting point of this panel, which explores the poetics and politics of water across a range of geographical spaces (the English Channel and Atlantic and South Pacific Oceans), historical periods (early modern England, nineteenth-century France, and contemporary Chile), and critical contexts (Renaissance drama, Romantic aesthetics, and post-humanist visual culture). Various thematic perspectives will be covered, from the socio-cultural (e.g. nationhood and gender) to the legal and environmental (e.g. the demarcation and policing of maritime space).
Each paper navigates the relationship between the materiality of water (and human engagements with that materiality) and its deployment as metaphor. Together, they follow a double imperative: first, to explore the significance of different cultural imaginations as to how humankind engages with water; second, and by extension, to contend that close comparative attention to hydrological phenomena in literature and film can simultaneously provoke a timely rethinking of established cultural frameworks (including humanist individualism, Romantic idealism, and post-colonialism). Along these parallel lines, the panel seeks to push at the parameters of ‘oceanic studies’ and to contribute to the inventive ‘geophilosophy of watery spaces’ that is highlighted in the ‘Water Logics’ CFP.
| Period | 11 Apr 2019 → 12 Apr 2019 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | New Orleans, United States, LouisianaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |