Stories of Water/Storied Water: Agential Realism and New Thalassology in the 21st-century Literary Classroom

Abstract

The article examines water as a nonhuman agent while discussing the relevance of hydrofiction in a literary classroom. It substantiates storied water as a signifying subject of expressive potential in building a posthuman relationship of care and empathy. This article will attempt to make four contributions: (1) it will describe the concepts of materialist ecocriticism, and new thalassology, and situate the conceptualizations within the broader fields of environmental humanities, (2) it will reinscribe the image of water as a densely plural and a tentacular living organism using Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and Stacy Alaimo’s notion of transcorporeality, (3) it will briefly overview hydroficion as a critically apt genre for interrogating the disoriented dialectics between humans and nonhumans, and consider Emmi Itäranta’s young adult dystopian fiction, Memory of Water (2012) as the primary entry point in de-anthropocising wet matter, and (4) it will delineate the relevance of water narratives and the inclusion of such narratives in higher education curricula. In conclusion, the article hopes to academically sacralize water as a medium of planetary commitment endowed with the agency to narrate its story of dispossession and render itself resilient to vulnerability and misuse.

Keywords

• storied water
• new thalassology
• transcorporeality
• agential realism
• hydrofiction