Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Steve Mentz. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 225 pp.
Review by Lawrence Buell
14 March 2016
Although the sea has been a subject of keen interest for creative imagination from Homer’s Odyssey to Derek Walcott’s Omeros and beyond, with scattered exceptions literature studies has lagged behind history, geography, and other allied fields in engaging it. The rise of contemporary colonial, imperial, and environmental humanistic scholarship from the 1970s onward might have seemed to predict otherwise, yet ecocriticism was born on terra firma and still largely remains there. The present century, however, may be witnessing a transformation of oceanic literary studies—the blue humanities as Steve Mentz was one of the first to term it—from a niche pursuit to a concerted movement. Two notable initiatives have been intensified scrutiny of the history of maritime literary genres, as in Margaret Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea (2010) and Hester Blum’s The View from the Masthead (2008), and literary-environmental scholarship on Euro-peripheral islanded cultures and/or the marine ecological imaginary, as in Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005), ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and William Handley, and Stacy Alaimo’s partially-published Composing Blue Ecologies, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss.
Mentz, a specialist in early modernism, comes to Shipwreck Modernity as author of one of the two critical books of Shakespeare studies I know that is squarely focused on the oceanic, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009). (The other, structured topically rather than play-by-play, is Dan Brayton’s 2012 Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration.) Shipwreck Modernity is more ambitious in scope and also quite differently framed, in an arresting fusion of the two initiatives described earlier. Overspilling its nominal time-bounds in both directions, Mentz holds up the phenomenon of shipwreck, from classical epic to recent times, as an eco-cultural formation that undermines conventional period divisions (medieval/early modern) and customary narratives of techno-modernization, also reproaching standard backdating of the Anthropocene-Age planetary dominance to the advent of the industrial revolution or thereabouts. As Mentz sees it, shipwreck figures in literary (and literal) history constitute a “recognizable literary microgenre” that showcases the ocean itself as “an essential actor in the drama of globalization” (pp. xxx, xxxi). Through this lens, sweeping claims of nature as social construct and of modern humans as the dominant planetary change agents are exposed as vastly overstated if not mendacious.
These bold arguments are advanced most forcefully in Mentz’s two prefatory sections, and in his initial case study of the “Account of the Very Remarkable Loss of the Great Galleon, S. João,” wrecked off southeast Africa in 1552. These fifty or so pages, roughly one-third of the main text, are eye-opening and instructive both from an environmental humanistic and a literary-historical standpoint. After that, the book gets more predictable, derivative, and digressive. But one remains grateful for Mentz’s big idea, all the more so considering that the blue humanities is still in its early, exploratory stages.
