Project lead
Marion Troxler
Abstract
In essence, this dissertation argues that merfolk and the beach fulfil a similar function in literature: That is, they offer a confrontation and consolidation with the in-between, with fluid boundaries and shifting categorisations on an ontological level. This work will add the aspect of their interrelation to littoral as well as merfolk studies, which has barely been explored. Furthermore, it exemplifies a methodological approach to literature aiming to complicate the dualistic construction of nature as background on which plot is enacted by combining both setting and character as the focus of the analysis. Moreover, my project has already provided a significant contribution to the SNSF-funded project “The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century”, which has produced a Digital Atlas as output.
Embodying in-betweenness, merfolk and the beach challenge dualistic constructions of land/water, human/animal, culture/nature and human/nature, and highlight interdependences. The beach is not only where merfolk and humans can meet and transformations often take place, it is also the setting where the hybridity and transformability of merfolk is reflected in the materiality of the environment. As a liminal zone, the beach challenges the separation between land and sea, between culture and nature. It is a place to “learn to be at home in quivering tension of the in-between,” as Astrida Neimanis puts it (“Hydrofeminism” in Undutiful Daughters, 93). As a prime example of an ecotone, the beach is “more than just a marker of separation or even a marker of connection”. As John Mack phrases it, “the beach is an in-between place, an ambiguous place[…] awaiting a metamorphic role” (The Sea: A Cultural History, 165). This highlights the continuity of the processes which shape but never finish the beach. The littoral zone is a space where the difference between land and water becomes visible and which simultaneously blurs the boundaries between. As such, it makes palpable how dualisms can be re-thought or dissolved.
In 21st century merfolk literature, this inherent hybridity and transformability is often used as a mode to resist the domination underpinned by heteronormative, patriarchal and (post-)colonial structures. Using four contemporary texts - Amy Sackville’s Orkney (2013), Margo Lanagan’s Brides of Rollrock Island (2012), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) - this dissertation proposes that merfolk literature offers an encounter with porous boundaries, shifting meanings, and counter-hegemonic structures. Moreover, merfolk texts pose an excellent opportunity to read the more-than-human, the non-human and the human together as an exercise in resisting dualistic oppositions. The choice of texts draws specifically on different cultural realisations of merfolk figures, from selkies, mermaids and Mami Wata to the afrofuturist ‘Deep Sea Dwellers’ of Drexciya. Drawing on ecofeminist theory and New Materialism, I am reading these texts with a lens that focuses on how “[…] the ways representations of nature are linked with representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality.” (Legler, “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism” in Ecofeminism, 227). As such, my work follows the call for a “common, integrated framework for the critique of both human domination and the domination of nature” and furthers the “recognition of a complex, interacting pattern of both continuity and difference” in order to challenge these current hegemonic structures which threaten existences (Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature 1, 67).
Supervision
Prof. Dr. Virginia Richter
PD Dr. Ursula Kluwick, University of Bern
Discipline
Modern English Literature
Kontakt
marion.troxler@unibe.ch
