‘Bodies of Water’ Work-in-progress Seminar | Online, 13 September

The online work-in-progress seminar titled Bodies of Water is organized by the OSL Sustainable Humanities Research Group. The seminar will be held remotely on September 13, 2024, from 15:00 to 16:30 CEST. The presentations will engage various dimensions and approaches to the Blue Humanities across different contexts and periods. These include late antique river poems (Formisano & Williamson), the environmental history of the River Shannon (Huber), reflections on the notion of the ‘cascade’ (Al-Bayaty de Ridder), and literary perspectives on theories of biological delineation (Brandt). Short individual presentations will be followed by a panel discussion. 

Interested colleagues and students can attend via this link. Registration is not necessary. Details for the event are found below. 

For more information, please contact Teun Joshua Brandt (t.j.brandt@rug.nl).  

Work-in-progress seminar ‘Bodies of Water’ 

 Online, 13 September 2024

Speakers:

• Marco Formisano and Leila Williamson, Ghent University
• Kate Huber, Tilburg University
• Teun Joshua Brandt, University of Groningen 
• Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder, Radboud University

• moderated by: Michael Boyden, Radboud University

Abstracts:

• Marco Formisano and Leila Williamson, Ghent University 

Mosella’s edge: the river in Ausonius and Venantius Fortunatus

In this paper we take inspiration from ecocriticism to discuss some late antique river poems. These river poems are incredibly vibrant and varied spaces in which to explore constraint, transgression, creativity, and poetics. Taking Ausonius’ Mosella as a starting point, we see how the river-poem can simultaneously embody and transgress its own inscribed boundaries – through its kaleidoscopic, centrifugal digressions that manipulate space and scale. Then, in Fortunatus’ De navigio suo (10.9), we see how this transgressive impulse is constrained within the self-imposed limitations of Christian panegyric, used in service of praising Fortunatus’ patrons. Rivers – in their fluidity, transgressivity, permeable boundaries, and capacity for radical metamorphosis – thus provide an excellent way in which the poets of late antiquity can inscribe and problematise notions of border and constraint. 

• Kate Huber, Tilburg University

Progress or Pollution? Analyzing the Environmental History of the River Shannon

The social, cultural, and ecological importance of Ireland’s longest river, the River Shannon, is hard to overstate. The environmental history of this riparian region coincides with its development. In the twentieth century, the Irish Free State sought to assert sovereignty through the Shannon Scheme, which built what was then the largest hydroelectric dam in the world and one of the first national electrical grids in Europe. In the aftermath of the Republic of Ireland’s mid-century push to invite foreign direct investment and extraction industries into the country, the River Shannon has become the site of industrialization, as well as social and environmental protest. Activist groups, such as FutureProof Clare, successfully resisted the building of an LNG pipeline in the Shannon Estuary while the Askeaton Contemporary Arts collective continues to critically engage with the ongoing contamination from the Aughinish Alumina factory, which was built in the late 1970s and began operations in 1983. Although scholars such as Sorcha O’Brien, Michael Rubenstein, Mark McGuire, and Dúnlaigh Bird have examined cultural expressions of the Shannon Scheme from literary and historical perspectives, scholars have yet to use ecocritical theory to study connections between contemporary environmental issues and activism alongside these earlier forms of development and social protest in and around the River Shannon and the Shannon Estuary. My analysis expands on the work of Irish studies and environmental humanities scholars to explore the extent to which artistic and cultural expressions across the twentieth century reframe understandings of progress and sustainability in Ireland’s most expansive watershed. Examining Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River, Sean Keating’s paintings of the Shannon Scheme, and William Lysacht’s The Abbey Fishermen: A Short History demonstrates multiple possibilities of progress and conceptions of sustainability that find an echo nearly a century later in Michelle Horrigan’s art installations and publications Stigma Damages on the underacknowledged environmental injustices of Aughinish Alumina. By tracing these cultural representations of industry and activism on the River Shannon through postcolonial ecocritical, environmental justice, and eco-media lenses, this article highlights tensions between conceptions of progress and sustainability in twentieth and twenty-first century Irish art and literature that reframe policy decisions about development and conservation projects to imagine possibilities for more enduring futures. 

• Julée Al-Bayaty De Ridder, Radboud University

Cascades: Water, Extinction and Mourning

In this presentation, I share my affective experience of a cascade that has been drying up for the past years due to human-induced climate change. I do so by reflecting on the watery term ‘cascade’ and its connection to the natural phenomenon ‘extinction cascade.’ Thinking with water as it drips off the cascade edge can aid in re-imagining theories and methodologies along water’s qualities: fluid, changing, ungrounded, slippery. However, I also critique the use of watery terms by highlighting their limitations in environmental discourses.   

• Teun Joshua Brandt, University of Groningen 

Bodies of water? Rethinking Biological Individuality in the Literary Imagination

While the modern novel, in general, has contributed to the construction of the anatomic and autonomous individual (as discussed by Ian Watt and Georg Lukács), bodies of water have historically served as productive imaginative spaces for contemplating a more fluid corporeality. In this presentation, I will focus on the oceanic body in two science fiction novels and discuss how they reflect discussions in the philosophy of science regarding biological delineation: Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris and Frank Schätzing’s 2004 eco-thriller Der Schwarm. In both novels, the scientist protagonists are pushed to rethink their ontological prejudices in the face of biological anomalies, particularly in relation to how life manifests and the diverse forms of individuality it presents. A comparative examination of both works highlights the historical shift from essentialist approaches to the classification and delineation of life toward what the philosopher of biology John Dupré terms ‘promiscuous realism’: the acknowledgment that the structure of the world is profoundly complex and that any ‘cutout’ represents just one possibility among numerous others.

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