“Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities”

ABSTRACT: This article investigates the terraqueous entanglements of human and marine life in material and discursive contexts through an aquatic practice of material ecocritical theory. Material ecocriticism encourages us to read the ecology of the planet’s protean seas by way of their storied dimension, and to think the blue humanities and the discoveries of marine sciences through one another, in creative ways. In this context, two interlinked questions surface. 1. How do we theorize the seascapes whose materiality is hydrous without obfuscating its reality in figurative conceptualizing? 2. If our knowledge of the sea depends on how it is represented, and interpreted, will the sea’s biogeophysical existence cease to exist? I argue that the meanings of the sea always remain in the interstice between the discursive and the real, and that the experience of the sea gains meaning only in their corollary dynamics.