Incident at Mermaid's Cave (original) (raw)

‘Skin black and wrinkled’: The toxic ecology of the Sibyl’s cave

postmedieval, 2020

In Virgil’s Aeneid , the famous prophetess known as the Sibyl of Cumae is imagined as coextensive with her cavernous home, a porous volcanic cave that amplifies her voice. However, as the twelfth-century adaptors of the Aeneid reimagined the many-mouthed cavern of prophecy as the murky and blackened ecology at the entrance to the underworld, the Sibyl is similarly transformed into a withered and blackened witch in the Roman d’Eneas . This marginalized and racialized woman is poisoned by her environment, the ‘trans-corporeality’ of flesh and environ a harmful constellation of material and cultural factors. And yet the Sibyl survives, perhaps preserved by the toxic landscape and even granted specialized knowledge. A bit of moss growing from her ear in the German Eneit also suggests that mastery over nature is impossible, entanglement within the environment a kind of feminine resistance to masculine attempts at dominance over nature.

Repurposing Folk Horror for an Ecological Mode

n/a, 2019

I want to describe a shift in my understanding of, and working relation to, the films and literature of the 'English eerie', particularly where they overlap with folk horror. A change influenced by recent working in the register of myth and folk reparation: on 'Bonelines' with Tony Whitehead and on 'Plymouth Labyrinth' with Helen Billinghurst (both 2018-19). Across these two projects there has been, for me at least, a qualitative shift from a search for a Lovecraftian cultural residue in small South Devon villages, through an intuitive speculation about a pre-Roman Dumnonian magical mode and the 'worship' of the deep, to an engagement with vital forces ('gods of the earth'). A phase transition within what I have called mythogeographical practice (Smith, 2010); a change from attending to stories about genii loci to walking with the genii themselves.

SEA MONSTERS EDITED BY THEA TOMAINI AND ASA SIMON MITTMAN

BEACHES GIVE AND TAKE, bringing unexpected surprises to society, and pulling essentials away from it. The ocean offers monsters— whales and whirlpools—but when a massive creature is pushed into human proximity by the ocean’s wide shoulders, the waves deposit and erode human assumptions about itself and its environment: words, sounds, breath, water, wind, esh, blood, and bones wash in and out. Chance encounters reveal us to ourselves anew; we recognize an Otherness and thereby gain an ethical understanding of difference. Learning to read the monster’s environmental signs helps humans determine the scope of the monster’s place in the eco/cosmic timeline and defeat it—until the epic cycle inevitably repeats. We confront our tiny time between catastrophes; monsters live and live and live. Even so, when humans identify and face monsters, we do so at the risk of exposing our own monstrosity. When we look into the inky backs of whales, or deep into vortices, what do we see? This volume of essays emerges from MEARCSTAPA’s panel, “The Nature of the Beast/Beasts of Nature: Monstrous Environments,” at the 3rd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the Paci c Ocean lays her face against the sand and waits.

Anthropocene, Nature, and the Gothic: An Interview with Christy Tidwell

REDEN, 2022

Mines and Technology, and she is one of the leaders of the ecomedia interest group at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Digital Strategies Coordinator at ASLE as well. Christy is the co-editor of the volumes Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (Lexington Books, 2018) and Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (Penn State UP, 2021) and a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on creature features. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Extrapolation, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, and Gothic Nature. She has also contributed to volumes such as

The Clarity of Darkness. Experiencing Gothic Anthropology

There are many ways of writing ethnographies (see e.g. Van Maanen, 1988; 1995), taking the shape of realistic stories, confessions, dramatic ethnography, and many others. The authors of these accounts are rarely detached from their work and various elements of the anthropologic experience, e.g. the fieldnotes (Jackson, 1995) awake intense feelings in their authors. The role of the anthropologist is one that inspired us to become self-reflective. Our previous experiences of field studies were more or less suffused by many and intense feelings, not only in regard to the field itself but also to our own role and the experience of doing field research in itself. Van Maanen (1995) recognizes the new heightened self-consciousness of the discipline. Our intention is to explore the experience of doing anthropologic studies, how we feel about being in the field, how the field influences us, what the label "anthropologist" may mean as an identity or as a way of self-presentation. We have carried out several explorations: we stood in places we explored at some point earlier, only this time holding up a poster saying that we were anthropologists. We observed how the place reacted to us, and what our place in the field felt like. This self-conscious and self-reflective study is, in our view, one that can be depicted as gothic: spiritual, turned inward, dark, moody. It is the case of the anthropologist exploring him or herself in the role of the explorer. It is turning the gaze from the lit up outside to the obscure inside, to encounter the strangeness and the loneliness and address it. We also believe that the solipsist and/or subjectivist self-reflective perspective in social sciences, or the perspective we label gothic, may offer interesting and worthwhile insights. Gothic science is: one more perspective borrowed from the arts, as many others before (functionalism, constructivism, postmodernism, etc.); a label already used by Peter and Martina Pelzer (1996) in their essay on contemporary subculture and music; a metaphor that we treat as an invitation to join in the conversation about science and being a scientist as seen inwards.