Software Ocean: New Media Aesthetics and Water in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Cheong, Rebecca
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 07, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Claire Colebrook, Major Field Member
Brian Lennon, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Bryan Waterman, Special Member
Adam Thomas, Outside Unit & Field Member
Hester Blum, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Janet Lyon, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- software studies
new media studies
user interface
oceanic studies
blue humanities
adobe illustrator
media studies
mapbox
google earth
mapping
cartography
literary cartography
spatiality studies
nineteenth-century american literature
american literature
US-American
literary studies
archipelagic studies
island studies
aesthetics
aesthesis
sea
terraqueous
planetarity
creative computing
technology
lidar
GIS
phenomenology
geocriticism
space and place
maritime
aquatic
critical ocean studies
environmental humanities
web mapping
vector graphics
software applications
mapping software
seafloor mapping
ocean mapping
bathymetry
hydrography
water
comparative literature
custom maps
literary maps
literary criticism
literary form
narrative
genre
novel
prose narrative
archipelago
reader-reception
reading practice
visuality
climate change
relationality
marine surveying
subsea imagery
ocean spatial data
narrative prose - Abstract:
- Software Ocean: New Media Aesthetics and Water in Nineteenth-Century American Literature looks at narrative prose written in and about the nineteenth-century and user interface affordances of contemporary software applications. This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century literature can contribute to modern bathymetry (the mapping of the seafloor to produce detailed depictions of its shape and relief), the results of which are filtered through software and shaped by preexisting ocular technologies. “American” in the title, or “America,” refers to spaces including and exceeding the continental Americas and their land borders. Software Ocean takes interdisciplinary and extra-disciplinary approaches. These approaches combine literary analysis, new media studies, Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), and aesthetics, and give both software and literature a certain equality. Each medium has its own value and special characteristics, which can be applied to and work in tandem with the other. When they are applied to one another, however, it becomes apparent not how similar they are, but how different they are from one another. Literary texts and software are alike in that they both participate in shaping our world, albeit in different ways and to produce different knowledges, and each one needs to be taken on its own terms. Chapters One to Three each examines selected nineteenth-century texts and a specific software application (Adobe Illustrator, Mapbox Studio, or Google Earth) to consider how user interface affordances of contemporary software applications and reading practices yield new processes and configurations for understanding cartographic infrastructure and representing oceanic space. Such processes and configurations include those in the traditions of expressive and creative computing. Chapter Four develops a working critical definition of a “decontinentalizing aesthesis,” a term the author adapts from Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez’s “decolonial aestheSis,” and probes the question of what an archipelagic literary form looks like and how such a form is of significance. The chapter unpacks the decontinentalizing potentiality of Herman Melville’s Mardi alongside the novel’s critical reception to flesh out the concept of a decontinentalizing aesthesis, and identifies a formal homology between inherited reading practices, genre expectations, and the way humans relate to and regard the world.