Steve Mentz 

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While reading “A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities After John Gillis” by Steve Mentz one thing that stuck with me was our human connection to water. For centuries humans have had a multitude of emotions revolving around the ocean and water as a whole. Feelings as opposite as fear and calmness have been a high point in the ways we speak about the water around us and our connection to it. One passage that I pulled from Mentz article that I felt drawn to was “For literary writers and scholars, the ocean seems especially attractive because of its metaphorical vastness. The great waters represent a principle of narrative fecundity that Salman Rushdie has described as the “sea of stories” (Mentz 140). The ocean draws out curiosity from human beings, the pure depth and feeling of the endlessness of the ocean has created a fascination within people. With these literary writers I have also noticed that although they may be speaking of the same topic, their tone and stories all feel rather unique to me. This could be because water is a representation of life and the different experiences we all have towards it can shape the ways we express ourselves revolving around the topic. The idea of the ocean representing narrative fecundity is something that I never thought much about, the possibilities are endless for creative minds to explore their emotions towards the water. Throughout the article Mentz speaks about not just the ocean but water as a whole having a deep relation with human life and even our cultures. With this in mind I started thinking about the possibilities that could be opened if we look at our lives the same way we do the ocean, as powerful and flowing. Another part of the article that relates to the ways that water can affect us was when Mentz quotes Moby-Dick, “One of the most widely quoted phrases from the novel holds that ‘meditation and water are wedded for ever.’ This phrase, however, does not exclusively describe the salt sea that is the novel’s primary setting” (Mentz 139). This quote along with Mentz point of it not being confined to only the sea is powerful. This explains that the flowing and depth of water is something that we should understand when also speaking of ourselves. Our lives are supposed to move and shift as time goes on much like water. These are all things that I will keep in mind while reading Moby-Dick because I know this novel will make me fall in love with the ideas revolving around blue humanities! 

Steve Mentz – changing what we know and how we think

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In the preface to Steve Mentz’s work “Deterritorializing,” he offers several different ways to view the world (especially the Ocean) and our way of thinking. The first change he offers is current (formerly field); here Mentz talks about how we should shape our viewing on how we think in fields and areas of expertise. Instead of thinking of it as something that is stable and set in stone, we should think of it as something that is in current and always flowing. Our knowledge shouldn’t be thought of as restricted to a certain subject or area of expertise, instead we should allow our knowledge to flow like water. Mentz writes “Fields produce harvests but can lie allow. Currents flow. We need flow to know Ocean.” In his second change, Mentz writes about water (formerly ground). Here he talks about how we should be reminded that a majority of Earth’s surface is covered in water, not land. Mentz writes “Our metaphors must float on water rather than resting on ground. In an aqueous environment, nothing stays on the surface forever.” What I got from this was that nothing stays the same, much like the flow of water, things rise and sink, and so much our own knowledge of the world. Mentz’s third word is flow (formerly progress). Here we replace the idea of linear progress with the idea that things are constantly changing in flow. This of course changes and challenges our perception of all that we know, which Mentz claims is a good thing. The fourth word Mentz brings up is ship (formerly state). Here he writes, “The dissolving force of oceanic history works against nationalism, though at times it may also tend in the directions of global or even imperial totality.” Mentz is saying that unlike a majority of nations, ships are one place were unity and equality is truly real. Our politics should should no longer be focused on the ideas of state, but rather ship – “trading, fighting, hailing, sighting” as Mentz writes. In his fifth word, Mentz proposes the idea of seascape (formerly landscape). He questions whether our language is too visual, and says that underwater creatures don’t necessarily need to rely on sight as much as we do. The sixth change Mentz offers is distortion (formerly clarity). Distortion is important, it changes how we view things and how we think of things. It can allow for us to rely on ourselves and our own knowledge rather than what we see in front of us. His seventh and final word is horizon (formerly horizon). Here Mentz talks about how the horizon is a place where new things become visible. The horizon is important in life, it’ll always be there, offer new ideas and changes. Mentz’s changes on these seven words offer us a new perspective on life, our lives are parallel to water and we must be reminded of that.

EC: 5 Questions for Steve Mentz

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  • How do you think social media influences the idea our culture holds of water?
  • What differences and similarities do you see on views of the water across countries?
  • Where is your favorite place you’ve swum?
  • If you had to choose one place to live, anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?
  • What is something you wish everyone knew about the ocean?

Week 4: Idea of the Workforce to Cultural Imagination

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One part of the reading that stuck out to me this week was the idea that as the sea becomes less relevant to the workforce, it becomes bigger in the cultural imagination. This is such a transition of thought, and maybe why we have more environmental awareness about the ocean. Instead of using the ocean as something for profit and to sustain ourselves, it becomes a cultural idea, and as it becomes personified, we feel more reason to protect it. As we create this cultural idea/fact that the ocean is alive, we can also see this idea of it being helpless, and want to protect it. Similar to a puppy, maybe. 

Gillis brought up this idea of the growing cultural imagination in the context of how the humanities shape our knowledge of the ocean. Right now, I think the ocean is such a signifier of wealth. Real estate properties are higher by the ocean, and it is considered a luxury to be able to go to the beach. I don’t know if this holds true everywhere, though. In Japan, not all of the coast was as valued as living in a big city, like Tokyo. I would be interested in exploring what differences there might be in the value of the ocean in the US versus Japan. In California, anywhere on the coast is expensive and valuable, but I went to plenty of coastlines in Japan that weren’t populated or seemingly expensive. How we view something and the cultural value we place on it is simply that.

I also think it should be noted that our idea of the ocean in the cultural imagination is so limited. When we think of going to the ocean, it is simply to go to the seashore, maybe dip our bodies in for a few minutes. When the ocean was more relevant to the workforce, thoughts of the ocean must’ve been so different. I doubt many thought of white sandy beaches; rather ports with large ships and months of journey. 

Week 4: Testing the Waters

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This will act as a follow-up to my last post on Philip Hoare’s What Moby-Dick Means to Me. For this post, I will be focusing on Andrew Delbanco’s the introduction to the novel.

I’ll admit, I skipped through the first chapters of the novel without reading the introduction, as most readers might have done on their first readthrough. I managed to stop myself from reading further when I realized that Chapters 3 and some of the chapters beyond that can span many pages. Thankfully, most chapters in this book are very short. However, given that there’s hundreds of them (135!) it’d make you feel like you’re on a whaling odyssey with Ishmael himself. I still think the introduction is worth reading; it reads like an essay on the language Melville employs in Moby-Dick and goes to great lengths to expound on the novel’s significance in the literary world.

Within the introduction, Delbanco writes that “Moby-Dick is simply too large a book to be contained within one consistent consciousness subject to the laws of identity and physical plausibility.” (xvii) It’s six hundred pages long, split across 135 chapters, and each chapter feels like you’re reading a completely different maritime book. With pages and chapters that many, it can indeed be difficult to even summarize the entirety of this story since it changes so much throughout the course of the book. You can expect the main character to go through his usual old man ramblings, seldom sticking to one subject at a time, and people will cherish those parts of the novel as a stylistic choice made by the one and only Herman Melville.

I think I’m starting to get what Hoare has said about this book being an “act of transference … an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history.” Moby-Dick is not meant to be read as a traditional novel, but as something else: for example, it can be read more like an experiment by Melville to see how much he can rattle off his knowledge on whales based his experience as a whaler. Or, it is Melville’s retelling of the sinking of the Essex from start to end. This novel is “hostile to all conventions,” as Delbanco puts it. There’s no “right” way to read Moby-Dick, and there’s no “wrong” way either. It reads how you want it to read.

Delbanco’s Introduction

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My focus was drawn towards Delbanco’s claim that Moby Dick has a distinctively American accent because it is predicated on the shared belief between thinkers that America needed to stop looking towards Europe and the past in order to forge a uniquely American path. It seems to me that the founding of this American story as we understand it now also necessitated the erasure of the history of the Indigenous peoples of the land in order to create its self-made facade. I am interested to consider how the text explores this subject. While I understand how radically new this form of thinking was in its time, now in hind sight it feels like this same American story is also now being weaponized against anyone that does not fit the constructed idea of the ‘American’ persona. It fundamentally misunderstands and erases the multiculturalism that built this country.

A Poetics of Planetary Water:

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Just reading the title of this article, I was already curious on how the use of “poetics” would be specifically applied to the study of water. I figured, since the ocean is often associated with the unknown and undiscovered, that its metaphorical sense was solely the reason to apply poetics. However, this article redefined the use of poetry as “powerful tools…because poems originate in and are directed to individual humans while also imagining vaster scales” The multiple ways one can interpret a poem creates a natural fluidity that coincides with the ever-changing nature of water in all forms.  This free-framing mindset helps to break away from the confinements of categorization. Of course, poems can be categorized but their interpretation and point can differ vastly depending on who is reading it, when they’re reading it, and how they’re reading it. 

My favorite example came from the article’s analysis on Hamlet, regarding the scene where two characters are pondering about the clouds in the sky. “The hybridization that Polonius accomplishes as cloud-reader, in which he starts with an initial identification, camel, then bends it into two new forms, weasel and whale, essentially follows a hybridizing theory of interpreting forms of water.” One character interprets the sky differently from the other, much like how the sea can simultaneously mystify and terrify. This scene encapsulates the ideal that water defies categorization—yet it is an essential and ever present aspect of our human lives. 

Gillis once described the coastline as “humankind’s first Eden,” so now I wonder—is the sea the place where we were to be cast out from Eden? Or is the Sea itself Eden, and we have cast ourselves out of it.

Andrew Delbanco Introduction to Moby-Dick

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In his introduction, Andrew Delbanco proposes the idea that Moby-Dick “is a book of universal reach about the neediness of men when they are denied the props of rank and custom; a book about what can happen to men in conditions of radical exposure.” (Delbanco 23) This idea to me reminds us that Melville’s novel is not simply about whaling but about the fragility of human beings when societal structures are stripped away from us. People rely on these “props of rank and custom” – social hierarchies, traditions, and institutions – to give them identity and purpose. When these “props” are gone, individuals find themselves exposed and vulnerable, forced to find a purpose by themselves, which can cause social conflict and loss of identity. 

I feel like the setting of the ocean helps intensify this theme. At sea, crews are radically isolated, they are cut off from the stabilization that lands provide. Crewmates are their only support available, but these relationships can be fragile due to each individual’s intentions, like their selfishness or corruption, for instance. Delbanco states that Melville highlights how easily individuals can become needy when stripped of their “ranks” in society. It will be interesting to see how this is reflecting onto the novel and see how the crew mates interact with one another. What betrayal and mischief will occur?

Delbanco also emphasizes the importance of politics in this novel. The ship functions as an allegory for America, representing a diverse and unstable nation struggling with race, class, and authority. He mentions that the ship gathers many different people from different backgrounds, yet hierarchies are still present and favor white men. The ship reflects the fragility of American democracy and the individuals a part of that democracy. It is interesting because, although we -arguably- have advanced as a society, we still carry some of those ideals. White men are still at the top of the societal ladder. It will be interesting to read this novel and see how it is still impactful today. By stripping away the “props” of everyday society and forcing them to recreate it on the ship, Melville exposes the instability of political and social life, which makes Moby-Dick more than just whaling, it is both a psychological study and a political allegory of America. 

Blue Humanities according to Mentz

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Reading Steve Mentz’s “A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities after John Gillis”made me realize how rarely I think about water beyond the obvious. I know the ocean as something to swim in, lakes as places to relax, and rain as an inconvenience or blessing depending on the day. But Mentz pushes me to see water as a living, shifting presence that’s woven into everything. It’s unsettling but also kind of thrilling to imagine myself as part of this system of liquid, vapor, and ice.

What really stayed with me was his turn to poetry, especially Dickinson’s “An everywhere of silver” and Whitman’s surf-soaked embrace of the sea. Dickinson captures that fragile boundary where sand tries, and fails, to hold back the water. I’ve stood on beaches watching waves erase my footprints in seconds, and her words made me feel that same vulnerability. Whitman, by contrast, dives right in, almost seduced by the water. That image of surrendering to the sea made me think of my own swims—the way the first plunge into cold water shocks my body awake, and how quickly that shock turns into exhilaration. Mentz is right: poetry often describes that complicated mix of awe and danger better than science ever could.

Still, I felt a tension in the essay. The focus on poetry and philosophy sometimes floats above the material reality of water crises today. Rising seas aren’t just metaphors—they’re swallowing coastlines, displacing families, and reshaping entire communities. I wished Mentz had pulled more of those lived human struggles into the frame alongside Dickinson and Whitman. For me, the blue humanities feels most powerful when it connects personal experience, art, and the very real politics of climate change.

Even so, I walked away from this essay with a new sense of how water refuses to stay in one form, one place, or one meaning. That fluidity—sometimes comforting, sometimes terrifying—seems like the best way to think about our current moment. If poetry can help us sit with that instability, then maybe it can also help us imagine how to endure it.

Melville and Tone Within “Moby Dick”

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Within the introduction to Moby Dick, Deblanco calls the novel “A noisy book written in a braggart’s voice”. And, according to Google, a braggart is “a person who boasts about achievements or possessions”, which, I can assume from this quote, is a character trait of our protagonist Ishmael.

As a reader who has read 287 books (and counting) I absolutely LOVE when you can learn things about characters from the author’s writing. Or rather, when the author doesn’t TELL us what a character’s traits are, but shows us through their actions, thoughts, and most importantly, their writing. While this is most prevalent in books that switch point of views, it makes be excited to read the rest of this book.

In particular I notice this most within books that talk about race, glass, and generational gaps. Authors use words that fit the character, rather than words that might make the novel more understandable fir the reader. And it really engages me, as a reader. I want to feel immersed into the world. And, ultimately, it doesn’t make sense for a 75 year old to use Gen Z slang terms, or for a British character to use the word “trunk” for the back compartment of a car, rather than “boot”. And, hopefully we see this with Melville in the novel within the dialogue of characters, and everything in between. From the descriptions and outside perspectives we have read in class, I assume that this will happen, as we learn, in depth, about what it was like to be on a Whaling ship. After all, if an Alien could recreate whaling from this book, it must be very, very in depth, (and as someone who had read the novel in previous years, I can confirm that it indeed, does).

On the very first page of the Introduction, “Moby Dick” is called “the greatest English novel”. And, to be called that, it must have inspired countless authors. And even in other completely unrelated genres, sometimes I see authors who have clearly been inspired by Melville, using their words to show us character traits of both the point of view character, and the world.