[Now that I’ve got your attention I might remind you that books are never free, just as they are never singular: they are always collective products with both visible and invisible costs, benefits, and consequences in the world. In other words — support open-access publishing!]

I’ve been meaning to write more about both of these projects, but until I do that, here’s a quick note  about two new open-access books recently published by the mad geniuses at Punctum Books. I’m pleased and proud to be part of both, and hope that they find lots of happy readers!

How We Write is a collaborative book edited by U. of Toronto medievalist Suzanne Conklin Akbari. It features thirteen essays by academics of many different stages in the profession, from grad students to senior professors, admitting to the real truths of their writing experiences. It’s not a book of advice but an experiment in shared exposure. Writing is a messy process, and this book shares the mess. 

Oceanic New York, which I edited, started back in October 2013 as a symposium at St. John’s. The book is a collaboration between eighteen writers and artists who think together about the relationship between the Ocean and New York City. It features many wonderful experimental voices and images. I especially love the cover, designed for the book by artist Marina Zurkow, which may or may not represent on some symbolic level my commute to campus

Download both for free, or order inexpensive paperbacks, and while you’re at it support open-access publishing and Punctum Books.

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I’m on my way to SAA in Toronto in the morning, but I’ll drop a couple paragraphs into the Bookfish’s mouth before I go. This is the opening and one other paragraph from a new article, that will appear at some point in JEMCS. It grew out of a great one-day conference at Columbia, Commons and Collectivities, back in May 2011.

The title is “‘Making the green one red’: Dynamic Ecologies in Macbeth, Edward Barlow’s Journal, and Robinson Crusoe.”

We need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly central to twenty-first-century literary studies, calls have emerged to move “beyond the green” toward a more variegated spectrum of environmental alternatives. What Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls “ecology’s rainbow” refers to a current goal of the environmental humanities–to pluralize thinking about the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature. My work in this area has flowed out of oceanic or “blue” ecologies, but the logic of dynamic ecological thinking cannot stop at the water’s edge.The need to multiply ecocritical models responds to an increasing recognition, which began in the ecological sciences and has emerged in the humanities and social sciences more recently, that natural systems are more dynamic and less stable than once believed. The logic that moves from stasis and sustainability to dynamic “post-equilibrium” models requires that we match the constant innovations of natural systems with flexible interpretive practices. With this pressure toward dynamism in mind, this essay reconsiders green—but not the old green. Remembering that green is an oceanic as well as terrestrial color, and using a famously opaque phrase from Macbeth as a linguistic cue to re-introduce complexity into our literary models of natural systems, this essay offers immersion in hostile waters as a structure within which to think about the human encounter with nonhuman nature. In this model, it is no longer a question of “being green,” but of enduring, with effort and difficulty, inside the “green one.”

The syntactic ambiguity of Macbeth’s phrase underscores the conceptual difficulty of the project of ecocriticism. Re-seeing the blue global ocean as both green and red creates a colorful mess that might confuse as much as clarify. But rather than attempting to smooth out the system—rather than trying to argue that blue or green or red is the real color of the ocean—this essay insists that the price of admission to this eco-conversation is accepting disorderly environments. To go with our more colorful eco-palette, we need an appetite for chaos. To perform this disorder in my own methods, I am going to explore three multi-hued seas in three texts with three different critical methods. First, I will read the oceanic green in a canonical text, through an exaggeratedly close reading of this particular phrase in Macbeth. Next, I will shift from the canonical to the archival and multi-media by highlighting a little-known episode from the manuscript journal of Edward Barlow, a seventeenth-century English sailor. Finally, I will turn away from traditional analysis to a critical mode that flows with narrative, re-telling as ecocritical allegory the shipwreck scene from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The hero’s travail from sea to beach, I suggest, represents the ecological encounter in a moment of crisis. These three texts and three critical methods together reveal the blue-red-green ocean as a hybrid space, a natural environment intimately connected to human bodies while also threatening their survival.

Who wants a new “blue humanities” history of the West? I do!

I started this book just as the lights went out during Hurricane Sandy, and I was so enthralled I kept reading by flashlight for a few hours. The latest work of oceanic history by John Gillis, The Human Shore moves away from the islomania of his previous book, Islands of the Mind. 

 This new book is, as the title suggests, more human and coastal. Gillis begins his “alternative account of global history” (4) with the claim that human societies emerged and thrived across the littoral, taking advantage of the complex and fecund ecotones between land and sea. “Shores,” he writes, “were humankind’s first Eden” (38). Tracing the migratory patterns of early human history that follows the “kelp highway” (24) from Asia into North America and using the knowledge gained by recent work in “wet archeology” (28) that has found in now-flooded terrain evidence of ancient human habitations, this new history is “more amphibious than aquatic” (39) as it clearly traces humankind’s ancient debt to the sea.

A key distinction Gillis makes is the difference between living with and living on the coasts (98). To live on the coast means attempting to impose human structures and habits upon an unruly space;  the day I started reading The Human Shore, my childhood haunts on the Jersey shore learned how transitory beach houses really are as huge waves rolled through their porches onto the streets behind. Living with coastal space, by contrast, might entail more temporary dwellings; a Times editorial soon after the storm that I can’t find right now emphasized that Native Americans hadn’t built permanent settlements on the barrier islands of New Jersey, though they did live there seasonally. These less heavy-footprinted practice amounts to a different attitude toward oceanic spaces —

Those who have learned to live with as opposed to just on coasts know that it is folly to believe that they are wholly in control of their own destiny. There are not fatalists, but they are respectful of tides and currents that set the tempo and scale of their world. In this respect, they are still like ancient foragers, more gamekeepers than the gardeners who regard it as their destiny to transform nature. (98)

The book narrates the histories of amphibious cultures from Vikings to Polynesian navigator to the Phonecians and the Malay “sea-gypsies.” It tells a story of the “second discovery of the sea” after the Romantic era, when Thoreau began calling the beach the “best natural place on earth” (172) and writers from Byron to Melville to Whitman and Dickinson hymn its sublime alterity. At times I though Gillis was more convinced that I am by W. H. Auden’s claim that Romanticism invented the modern sea, a claim that Jonathan Raban swallows whole in his oft-cited introduction to The Oxford Book of the Sea.  Without minimizing the continuing force of the Romantic revolt, these writers no more invented the sea than Shakespeare, Lucretius, or Stephen Greenblatt invented the human.

I’m intrigued by the two-step process Gillis sees in our modern encounters with the sea, as “most Americans and Europeans became less physicall connected to the oceans…[but also] became more intimate with them mentally” (133). I think about this as a shift from a sailing culture, which relied on wind-born ships to enmesh local and  global economies, to a swimming culture, in which the individual’s primary connections to the ocean are intimate, personal, and immersive. I’ve got an essay forthcoming on “Swimmer Poetics” that traces some of the implications of that contrast, and I’ve got more coming on that front.

This book ends with a rousing call to “abandon traditional blue-water assumptions that the oceans are elemental and timeless, and adapt what might be called a brown-water acknowledgment of the dynamic hybrid nature of our coastal water worlds” (198). Having recent written about “brown ecology” in another forthcoming essay, for Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecologies collection, I’m right with him here, though I also think a place remains for blue as the color of our watery globe.

It’s an exciting time to be working in the blue humanities, and I’m glad John Gillis is sailing in these waters. We spent some time together a few years back at a great conference he co-organized on maritime environmental history, which is generating a book that got me thinking about eco-heroism. My son Ian & I also spent a glorious afternoon with him on Great Gott Island off the coast of Maine in 2011. I love his littoral move in The Human Shore, and look forward to its influence on the oceanic humanities in many forms.

Last weekend’s periodization discussion made a sharp turn when Stephen Greenblatt’s modernization parable, The Swerve, won the MLA’s first annual Lowell prize for fiction. Those who, despite the seasonal upwelling of darkness-into-light stories at  this time of year, remain unconvinced by zombie myths of Dark Ages and sudden lurches into modernity, have been outraged. Much cleverness and knowledge on display in the aftermath, including some lively FB & blog threads and on twitter, where Bruce Holsinger (@burnablebooks) warmed up the wires with a brilliant series of self-immolating tweet-quotations exposing the sillier claims of the book: see #TheSwerve.

The heart of this swervin’ exchange lays bare the conflict between two things: an objectively false feel-good story of “how the world became modern,” and a better-informed sense of what went on before Poggio found that copy of De rerum natura. The first thing is narrative, or perhaps myth; the other draws on the historical record.

I wonder what happens if we disentangle these threads? What if we rethink “modernity” as something other than a historical phenomenon? What if it’s a story?

The modern might not be a thing that “begins,” but a narrative humans tell about the felt experience of change. Discontinuity challenges any kind of systemic thinking, and “modernity” as a story makes sense of discontinuous change through the metaphor of the Break, the once-and-for-all transformation of what was into was is, or at least what is-becoming. This story gets told in crude and less crude formulations — The Swerve deserves mockery b/c it’s careless in its characterizations — but the modern-story can, perhaps, be retold to accommodate better representations of what precedes a modern-moment. A richer modernity story should also embrace the post-break fluidity that we mostly call postmodern. As Jameson sagely observes, any conception of modernity that cannot also explain postmodernity is pretty useless.

The four maxims Jameson lays out in A Singular Modernity (2002) are all pretty thought-provoking, actually. A quick paraphrase:  “We cannot not periodize” “modernity is a narrative category” “modernity is not about subjectivity” “we need a modernity that also understands the postmodern.”

History itself does not and need not follow this modern parable. Any narrative about historical change-and-continuity must, in order to be a narrative, do some violence to the plenitude of the historical record. Some narratives  are better than others; some work and others do not. I always prefer the flexible and recursive to the abrupt and enlightening, but that may be as much a generic preference for complexity and connection as an affinity for “reality,” that elusive thing. History overfills all human narratives; that’s why in addition to “facts” we need poetry — and geometry, statistics, economics, plasma physics, interior design, geoclimatology, the Hubble Telescope… Objects and alliances of all sorts, human and not.

I’m deeply sympathetic to the many eloquent defenses of medieval plenitude and cultural brilliance — the latest ones I’ve read include Anne Harris’ letter to the New Yorker when the pre-Swerve exerpt appeared, and Kellie Robertson’s scholarly prebuttal of Greenblatt before the book reached print (Kellie Robertson)– but I retain interested in something like “modernity” (maybe we need a different word?) as a flexible narrative category that responds to cataclysmic change. The narrative of modernity, of course, needn’t be new in 1517 or any other special time; we can see its traces all over the literary-historical record, from Boccaccio to Chaucer, in Ovid, Lucian, and Achilles Tatius, and many others. I’m not an Anglo-Saxonist, but I read The Wanderer as a lament about the human pain that attends cultural change.

Whatever heroic story of “the modern” you want to tell — bold explorers, brilliant textual scholars, brave Lutherans, lethal viruses, high-caloric American food crops feeding China or Ireland — will exclude and misrepresent aspects of the historical record. That’s a reason to tell more complex and less triumphant stories.

My own favorite story about what it feels like to live inside modernity is shipwreck, which might be a Break but usually isn’t a triumph. Or at least it doesn’t feel like one at first.

What to do with a problem like periodization? How can we historicist literary types do justice to both the messy abundance of the past and our professional habit of transforming it into period-centered narratives?

I’ve been enjoying some lively periodic-chatter over the past three days, starting with Jeffrey Cohen’s short essay on the problems with “early modern”, to which I made a few comments & was joined by the always inspiringly polyglot Jonathan Hsy. Then came a Facebook flutter over a smart hatchet job in the LA Times Book Review of Greenblatt’s The Swerve, which ends with a utopian wish for a non-telological “history without transitions.” I don’t like cartoon versions of post- Middle Ages historical change any more than anyone else,  — they don’t serve early modernists any better than they do medievalists — but I do like transitions, and don’t think we can do without them. We just need better, messier ones than the ones we’ve inherited.

The conversation continued yesterday with Rick Godden’s  response to both the above links, with coda in favor of Hinch’s transitionless history. “I can think of worse things,” says Rick. Today Jeffrey’s taken to the twitterverse, insisting that Greenblatt give back his awards from The Swerve. (It really is a revolutionary medium…)

Without in any way defending heroic conceptions of early modernity that insist on leaping high by stomping on medieval plurality, I don’t want history without transitions. I like plurality, multiplicity, radical difference, but I also want narratives of change, transformation, discontinuity. I think both those things are historically true, in terms of recoverable facts and records of human experience. But how to have both at once?

Two quick ideas about different ways to do periodization:

1. Historical transitions are myths at least as much as history. The felt shape of historical change, as recorded in many different cultural forms, responds to but also itself re-shapes historical experience. The idea of a “break” into early modernity doesn’t fit recorded facts, but it does express a lasting fantasy about patterns formed by accumulated historical events. Greenblatt didn’t invent that myth any more than Petrarch did. I don’t think either of their versions of the break does full justice to the historical record — I prefer shipwreck as a representation of early modern cultural change — but myths are always grist for our interpretive mill.

2. Always periodize — at least twice! With apologies to Jameson, we need periods and transitions, but also need to remember that we should not believe in them too much, that they always do some violence to the full (unknowable) plurality of historical experience. So what about a double (or more) system of periodization, which might be as simple as recognizing that all 21c critical work responds to 21c claims (“presentism”) as well as the demands of historical sources, or as sophisticated as remembering that historical periods never end in any conclusive way, that cultural habits of responding to historical stimuli layer themselves atop and alongside each other, intersecting and accumulating and recombining. With legible but messy transitions.