ABSTRACT
Building from the critique that ecocriticism has an “ocean deficiency” and emerged as a land-based criticism, this chapter explores how ecocriticism might be unmoored from its land-based methodologies to better account for the relationships between ocean, representations of ocean in texts, and ocean in cultural imaginaries. This chapter considers why ecocriticism embraced the work of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring as a motivating origin but failed to take up her robust writing about ocean in comparable ways. This chapter also explores the intersection of blue ecocriticism and environmental humanities as other disciplines contribute to a new blue humanities. By examining ocean in Western literary histories and, specifically, the silencing of Indigenous ways of knowing, this chapter critiques the idea of ecological literacy as it has been employed by ecocriticism.
