ABSTRACT
This chapter charts a few of the strategies and outcomes of a course I taught in the summer term of 2018 that operated at the intersection of literary studies, the Blue Humanities, and sustainability and critical climate change studies. In an age of massive ocean pollution, overfishing, and coral bleaching, this course aimed to provide students with the opportunity to encounter modes of literary, philosophical and scientific practices that offer varying models for understanding the cultural and material power but also fragility of the ocean. To this end, this seminar was guided by an educational strategy in which the posthumanist notions of “relationality,” “intra-action,” and “diffraction” were the seminar's governing pedagogical practice. This essay thus begins with a discussion of these notions in relation to “cultural ecology” and argues that foregrounding posthuman becoming in a literary and cultural studies classroom suggests (at least) three entangled sites of “reading” that must be carefully addressed. In the succeeding sections, I then provide my course syllabus, an outline of the results of the seminar's excursions to the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Helgoland and the Deutsches Meeresmuseum (the National Maritime Museum) in Stralsund, and brief summaries and traces of some of the seminar participants' criticisms and contributions.
