Modernity At Sea

Analyzes nineteenth-century seafaring narratives and their importance to ideas of modernity At once a literary-philosophical meditation on the question of modernity and a manifesto for a new form of literary criticism, Modernity at Sea argues that the nineteenth-century sea narrative played a crucial role in the emergence of a theory of modernity as permanent crisis. In a series of close readings of such works as Herman Melvilles White-Jacket and Moby Dick, Joseph Conrads The Nigger of the "Narcissus and The Secret Sharer, and Karl Marxs Grundrisse, Cesare Casarino draws upon the thought of twentieth-century figures including Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani, Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, and Antonio Negri to characterize the nineteenth-century ship narrative as the epitome of Michel Foucaults "heterotopia"a special type of space that simultaneously represents, inverts, and contests all other spaces in culture. Elaborating Foucaults claim that the ship has been the heterotopia par excellence of Western civilization since the Renaissance, Casarino goes on to argue that the nineteenth-century sea narrative froze the world of the ship just before its disappearancethereby capturing at once its apogee and its end, and producing the ship as the matrix of modernity.