Imagining Water
From the story of Noah and the Flood to Moby Dick, water has been a significant influence in our cultural imagination.
Navigating Memory was thus an appropriate title for an interdisciplinary conference at which papers on literature, cultural studies and psychology explored the symbolic value and appeal of water, informed by new scientific findings about how minds navigate spaces. A number of IAS events in previous years have forged strong working links between Psychology and English, which were strengthened at this conference. In particular, by hearing an inspiring range of speakers – such as the former poet laureate Andrew Motion – examine the relations between the mind and the world in a range of literary works, from the Middle Ages to the present, it raised awareness in both disciplines of the psychological and symbolic power of water; inspired younger researchers in the humanities to pursue interests in psychology through engagement with the scientific literature; and encouraged psychologists to use literature as a source of evidence when thinking about navigation and memory.
Water has provided a source of inspiration for writers, artists and thinkers through the ages. Nowhere in the Western world is more evocative of the role of water in the imagination than Venice. A series of nine public lectures on Venice and the Cultural Imagination since 1800 took Venice as a point of origin to explore poetry, prose, painting and music. Highlights included Andrew Wilton of the Tate gallery discussing J.M.W. Turner’s studies of Venice; Dinah Birch investigating John Ruskin’s writing on the city; and Bernard Beatty describing how Byron made his own a city depicted famously by Shakespeare.
Although Venice provides a centre for water and literature in European culture, water also provides a way of thinking about global issues, in particular the ongoing effects of postcolonialism. Jennifer Terry continued to work on a book on the Black Diaspora, the global racial communities created by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Iain Chambers worked on his book on Mediterranean Blues, looking at postcolonialism and modernity. His new Insightspaper summarised his work in the field of ‘maritime criticism.’ Conventionally, our understanding of what it means to be modern has been tied to metaphors of progress, development and growth. However, Chambers argues that modernity can instead be understood through the metaphor of water; literature such as Melville’s Moby Dick presents modern humanity as unstable and uncertain – like the sea itself.
Listen to Iain Chambers’ lecture on the Mediterranean, Modernity and Maritime Criticism at:
www.durham.ac.uk/ias/events/fellowslectures200910/chambers
Reflections
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