Tidal Conrad (Literally)

Schmitt, Cannon

doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.55.1.7

Cited by 38 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…This emphasis on the technical language involved in seafaring and aquatic surveying has been influential in studies of both nineteenth‐century sea fiction and domestic fiction concerned with inland water's attachment to global capital. Schmitt's quasi‐tidalectic reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) uses the tides framing the novel to show how elevating the visibility of aqueous features—tidal patterns and currents—and the techniques required to navigate them deepens our view of the text's self‐reflexivity and thereby its status as an almost‐not‐Victorian, not‐quite‐modernist text (2012, pp. 7–10, 26–27).…”

Section: Critical Hydrography Ii: Long‐nineteenth‐century Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical hydrography in the long nineteenth century

McAuley

2022

Literature Compass

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This essay canvasses a variety of approaches to the cultural and literary study of water in recent historical eras. While various aqueously‐minded approaches have been presented in recent decades, they have not been fully integrated into the ecological mainstream of environmental humanist criticism, particularly in nineteenth‐century studies. This essay integrates discourses across geography, geology, cultural studies, and literary studies in order to theorize critical hydrography, an aqueous approach to cultural objects that apprehends water as an ecological domain influencing both method's design and its attentions. The essay shows how critical hydrography reflexively attaches itself to histories of race, empire, and capital in apprehending the scientific filiations of the environmental humanities. Critical hydrography conceptualizes water as method to raise its visibility in ecocritical discourse.

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Section: Critical Hydrography Ii: Long‐nineteenth‐century Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical hydrography in the long nineteenth century

McAuley

2022

Literature Compass

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“…Although Heather Love (2015) is charting the genealogy of descriptive practices in twentieth-century literature and social science and Cannon Schmitt (2012) is writing the history of technical, denotative language in the novel, many scholars of literature continue to belittle "mere description" and to champion interpretation, despite or because they cannot agree whether to interpret a text is to determine its meaning or to reveal the impossibility of doing so. Literary critics tend to value in scholarship what they value in literature itself: wit, ambiguity, connotation, vivacity, figurative language, resistance, transgression, and selfreflexivity about the ways that language and consciousness shape perception and expression.…”

Section: Surface Reading As Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and the Value of Scale

Marcus¹

2016

Modern Language Quarterly

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Through a reading of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, which readers inside and outside the academy have valued for decades, this essay teases out how literary critical value is often aligned with scale: big claims, minutely close readings, and the ability to move gracefully between them. The essay also identifies and discusses four techniques basic to literary criticism: description, interpretation, explanation, and evaluation. A coda speculates about the links between Mimesis and a visual technology introduced into university lecturing a few decades before Auerbach wrote his magnum opus: the slide projector.

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“…Cannon Schmitt, for instance, analyzes the ebb and flow of the Thames in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness : the literal turn of the tides and the physical rotation of the ship, Schmitt argues, figuratively turns the novella's focus from the Congo to London, from Belgian colony to British imperial metropole. 8 If we attend only to the literal, then we slip into the dryasdust antiquarianism critiqued by the V21 manifesto. 9 And if we offer only uncritical, all-too-easy metaphors of "flow" and "fluidity" when describing literary depictions of maritime life, we slip into what Margaret Cohen calls "hydrophasia," an inability to conceive of the sea as (quite literally) the sea.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Oceanic

Celeste

2023

Victorian Literature and Culture

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This entry expands upon the “oceans” entry from the original Keywords issue. In moving from “oceans” to the “oceanic,” I call for a hydrographic remapping of the nineteenth century, offering a new perspective of networked culture, geopolitics, and ecology via maritime circulation and exchange. Noting selected recent projects as examples in this critical turn, I emphasize the stakes, affordances, and challenges of “reading the oceanic.” The oceanic, I contend, is not simply a descriptor of space but rather an active, ideologically charged and theoretically robust mode of representation.

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Tidal Conrad (Literally)

Cited by 38 publications

References 4 publications

Critical hydrography in the long nineteenth century

Critical hydrography in the long nineteenth century

Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and the Value of Scale

Oceanic

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