Modernity at Sea

[Dave Monroe]

Casarino, Cesare.  Modernity at Sea:
   Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis.
   Mpls.: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 
  
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
Melville's White-Jacket and Moby Dick, Joseph Conrad's
The Nigger of the "Narcissus" and The Secret Sharer,
and Karl Marx's Grundrisse, Cesare Casarino draws upon
the thought of twentieth-century figures including
Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Leo
Bersani, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Antonio
Negri to characterize the nineteenth-century ship
narrative as the epitome of Michel Foucault's
"heterotopia"-a special type of space that
simultaneously represents, inverts, and contests all
other spaces in culture.

Elaborating Foucault's 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 disappearance-thereby
capturing at once its apogee and its end, and
producing the ship as the matrix of modernity.

Cesare Casarino is associate professor in the
Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative
Literature at the University of Minnesota.

$22.95 Paper ISBN 0-8166-3927-2
$63.95 Cloth ISBN 0-8166-3926-4

272 Pages 7 x 10

June 2002
Theory Out of Bounds Series, volume 21

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/C/casarino_modernity.html

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