Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550–1750: Difference between revisions

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''Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750'' was part of the [[Exhibitions at the Folger]].
''Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750'', one of the [[Exhibitions at the Folger]], opened June 10, 2010 and closed on September 4, 2010. ''Lost at Sea'' was curated by Steve Mentz of St. John’s University with Carol Brobeck of the [[Folger Shakespeare Library]].
 
Being at sea means having no clear place in the world. Faced with the featureless, boundless ocean, early modern mariners learned that living and working in this space required both conceptual and technical labor.  Sailors employed practical navigational technologies including compasses, astrolabes, and maps, and also conceptual frameworks such as Providential theology, literary narratives, and the early stages of empirical science.  They needed to navigate complex networks of winds and currents, and they also needed to understand the watery depths that buoyed them up.
This exhibition explores the tools English mariners and writers used—from atlases, sextants, and star charts to prayer-books, symbols, and stories—to find themselves on changing oceans.
 
== Curation ==
 
''Lost at Sea'' was curated by Steve Mentz. Mentz is Associate Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City.  He is the author of ''At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean'' (2009), two additional monographs, and numerous articles on Shakespeare, ecological criticism, maritime culture, and related topics. He was the recipient of a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library which, he reveals in his book’s acknowledgments, “contains more real salt than many think.”
 
=== Curator's insights ===
 
''The following is an excerpted podcast transcript of Steve Mentz's July 13, 2010 lecture entitled "Lost at Sea: At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean"''
 
What I’m going to try to offer over the course of this talk tonight, is some essential features of the ocean as human beings can partially understand it. And I want to suggest that this isn’t actually as strange and academic as it might seem. I want to suggest that this is actually the way we encounter the ocean when we go to the beach on vacation. We just don’t always articulate it. And so on the one level I’m trying to bring together some historical literary material, and I’m also trying to capture the feeling that we each have when we stand on the beach and we look at the ocean and we have that little feeling of difference or slight dislocation, of being in the presence of the largest thing on the planet.
 
So, I’m going to try to outline three primary features of the ocean as it, as it appears in a poetic or historical sense. First of all that the ocean is opaque and it resists our seeing through it. Second of all, and this is a phrase that I get from Shakespeare, that the ocean is hungry, and third, that the ocean is transformative. It transforms itself and it transforms us.
 
Living on land we sometimes forget how much the sea’s physical structures control our physical and cultural histories. We should remember.
 
It’s true that poetry can’t keep oil out of the Gulf, or protect low lying cities from tropical storms, but it’s also true that language is one of the basic tools that our culture uses to grapple with our unstable ocean drenched environment. Shifting away from the supposed stability of land will cause us to abandon certain kinds of happy fictions and replace them with less comforting narratives. Fewer insular Tahitis and more ship wrecks. But, and this is really my key point, both in the talk tonight and the exhibition outside, and also in the book. We already have these narratives. We just don’t always put them at the center which is where they belong. The trick going forward will be to replace the tragic narrative of humanities failed attempts to control nature with less epic, more improvisational stories about working with an intermittently hostile natural world. We need stories about sailors and swimmers and divers to supplement our over-supply of warriors and emperors. These stories are already there, Odysseus swims to shore from his wrecked ship, Ishmael survives the destruction of the Pequod, Robinson Crusoe thrives on his island home. In Shakespeare Marina, Ferdinand, and Viola all survive immersion even if Othello, Timon and Lear do not. These are stories we can use.
 
When we look for the sea we see it. It’s always there. We may not understand the waters, but we know where to find them. The sea’s overwhelming presence in our physical and imaginative worlds gives us reasons to reread Shakespeare and Anglo-American history with salt in our eyes. Think about how our fears of flood spill into semi-opaque affirmations and transformations. Because these stories unfold the rich and strange history of our imagined relationship with the biggest thing on the planet, Shakespeare’s ocean and the oceans in Lost at Sea are shifting symbols whose meanings are never exhausted their unreachable bottoms conceal treasure and promised death. Reading Shakespeare for the sea thus launches the vast and slightly quixotic project that I call Blue Cultural Studies. A way of looking at our own terrestrial culture from an offshore perspective.  As if we could align ourselves with the watery element. What we will find is a painful and joyful history of coming to terms with a world of flux. Shakespeare and Lost at Sea ask us to read as if poetic narratives and the poetical imagination can help us embrace and endure ocean driven disorder. Whether we can always imitate Shakespeare’s shipwreck survivors or Melville’s whalemen or Robinson Crusoe isn’t certain, but as our world goes bluer and less orderly, these stories have something that we need.
 
Listen to excerpts of Steve Mertz's lecture.
 
<html5media>http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/mediawiki/media/images_pedia_folgerpedia_mw/5/5c/SteveMentzexcerpt.mp3</html5media>
 
The article '''Scholars' insights''' provides the entire transcript and as well as to the full podcast of this lecture.
 
== Contents of the exhibition ==
 
=== Lost at Sea exhibition material ===
 
=== Scholar's insights on Lost at Sea ===
 
=== [[Lost at Sea children's exhibition|''Lost at Sea'' children's exhibition]] ===
 
== Supplemental materials ==
 
=== Multimedia experiences ===
 
=== Audio Tour ===
 
=== Suggestions for further reading ===
 
=== Related programs ===

Revision as of 22:03, 21 February 2015

Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger, opened June 10, 2010 and closed on September 4, 2010. Lost at Sea was curated by Steve Mentz of St. John’s University with Carol Brobeck of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Being at sea means having no clear place in the world. Faced with the featureless, boundless ocean, early modern mariners learned that living and working in this space required both conceptual and technical labor. Sailors employed practical navigational technologies including compasses, astrolabes, and maps, and also conceptual frameworks such as Providential theology, literary narratives, and the early stages of empirical science. They needed to navigate complex networks of winds and currents, and they also needed to understand the watery depths that buoyed them up.

This exhibition explores the tools English mariners and writers used—from atlases, sextants, and star charts to prayer-books, symbols, and stories—to find themselves on changing oceans.

Curation

Lost at Sea was curated by Steve Mentz. Mentz is Associate Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. He is the author of At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean (2009), two additional monographs, and numerous articles on Shakespeare, ecological criticism, maritime culture, and related topics. He was the recipient of a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library which, he reveals in his book’s acknowledgments, “contains more real salt than many think.”

Curator's insights

The following is an excerpted podcast transcript of Steve Mentz's July 13, 2010 lecture entitled "Lost at Sea: At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean"

What I’m going to try to offer over the course of this talk tonight, is some essential features of the ocean as human beings can partially understand it. And I want to suggest that this isn’t actually as strange and academic as it might seem. I want to suggest that this is actually the way we encounter the ocean when we go to the beach on vacation. We just don’t always articulate it. And so on the one level I’m trying to bring together some historical literary material, and I’m also trying to capture the feeling that we each have when we stand on the beach and we look at the ocean and we have that little feeling of difference or slight dislocation, of being in the presence of the largest thing on the planet.

So, I’m going to try to outline three primary features of the ocean as it, as it appears in a poetic or historical sense. First of all that the ocean is opaque and it resists our seeing through it. Second of all, and this is a phrase that I get from Shakespeare, that the ocean is hungry, and third, that the ocean is transformative. It transforms itself and it transforms us.

Living on land we sometimes forget how much the sea’s physical structures control our physical and cultural histories. We should remember.

It’s true that poetry can’t keep oil out of the Gulf, or protect low lying cities from tropical storms, but it’s also true that language is one of the basic tools that our culture uses to grapple with our unstable ocean drenched environment. Shifting away from the supposed stability of land will cause us to abandon certain kinds of happy fictions and replace them with less comforting narratives. Fewer insular Tahitis and more ship wrecks. But, and this is really my key point, both in the talk tonight and the exhibition outside, and also in the book. We already have these narratives. We just don’t always put them at the center which is where they belong. The trick going forward will be to replace the tragic narrative of humanities failed attempts to control nature with less epic, more improvisational stories about working with an intermittently hostile natural world. We need stories about sailors and swimmers and divers to supplement our over-supply of warriors and emperors. These stories are already there, Odysseus swims to shore from his wrecked ship, Ishmael survives the destruction of the Pequod, Robinson Crusoe thrives on his island home. In Shakespeare Marina, Ferdinand, and Viola all survive immersion even if Othello, Timon and Lear do not. These are stories we can use.

When we look for the sea we see it. It’s always there. We may not understand the waters, but we know where to find them. The sea’s overwhelming presence in our physical and imaginative worlds gives us reasons to reread Shakespeare and Anglo-American history with salt in our eyes. Think about how our fears of flood spill into semi-opaque affirmations and transformations. Because these stories unfold the rich and strange history of our imagined relationship with the biggest thing on the planet, Shakespeare’s ocean and the oceans in Lost at Sea are shifting symbols whose meanings are never exhausted their unreachable bottoms conceal treasure and promised death. Reading Shakespeare for the sea thus launches the vast and slightly quixotic project that I call Blue Cultural Studies. A way of looking at our own terrestrial culture from an offshore perspective. As if we could align ourselves with the watery element. What we will find is a painful and joyful history of coming to terms with a world of flux. Shakespeare and Lost at Sea ask us to read as if poetic narratives and the poetical imagination can help us embrace and endure ocean driven disorder. Whether we can always imitate Shakespeare’s shipwreck survivors or Melville’s whalemen or Robinson Crusoe isn’t certain, but as our world goes bluer and less orderly, these stories have something that we need.

Listen to excerpts of Steve Mertz's lecture.

The article Scholars' insights provides the entire transcript and as well as to the full podcast of this lecture.

Contents of the exhibition

Lost at Sea exhibition material

Scholar's insights on Lost at Sea

Lost at Sea children's exhibition

Supplemental materials

Multimedia experiences

Audio Tour

Suggestions for further reading

Related programs