Abstract

My dissertation, "The Voyages of Heterotopia: Meditations on Modernity, Crisis and the Sea," locates within nineteenth-century British and American literary discourses about the sea some of the most crucial symbolic forms for the emergence of the cultures of modernity. The literature of the sea voyage experienced a sudden and unprecedented flourishing in the nineteenth century at the same time when the world of the sea became vastly more important both for international political economy and also for its attendant colonial ideologies and imperialist enterprises. In the nineteenth century the sea narrative assumed entirely different positions within the field of cultural production from the ones it had previously occupied, as it found itself both an object and a constitutive part of the momentous historical transformations which marked the transition from mercantile and artisanal social structures to industrial capitalist ones. Such a crucial position in culture, I argue, made the sea narrative in the nineteenth century an appropriate stage for the unfolding of some of the most urgent social and political concerns of the time such as, for example, the question of modernization, the preoccupation with race, and the emergence of conceptual categories and representations of same-sex desire. ;Through a series of readings of British and American nineteenth-century sea novels, this project engages with Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia--intended as a special type of space which simultaneously represents, contests and inverts all other spaces in culture--and with his claim that the ship has been "the heterotopia par excellence" of Western civilization. While Foucault's claim extends from the sixteenth century onwards, I am interested, rather, in the final terminus of the ship's development as "the heterotopia par excellence." In the nineteenth century the sea narrative, while recording the most glorious historical moment of the ship, was also thoroughly imbued with premonitions of a future--namely, the twentieth century--in which the heterotopia of the ship would be inevitably relegated to the quaint and dusty shelves of cultural marginalia. The nineteenth-century sea narrative freezes the world of the ship into a fleeting image flashing onto the screen of history for one last moment before its disappearance; it captures simultaneously the apogee and the end of the ship as "the heterotopia par excellence" in Western civilization. Ultimately, my dissertation is a study of the form of such an historical paradox--a form which is the eminent cultural structure through which modernity made itself manifest