Session: 1f
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.16
Chair: Claudia Alonso Recarte
Monika Class (Lund University), “Grievable Monsters: Adaptations of Melville’s Whale”
Abstract: This paper examines representations of baleen whales and sperm whales as victims, protectors, agents of bloody retribution and other semiotic roles in selected works of literature, focusing on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: or, the Whale (1851), Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869-1870), Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall (2023) and Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall (2024). These four whale novels have not been compared yet although they are intertextually connected (irrespective of the question of influence). The investigation is guided by two interrelated questions: How do the texts mix pastoral and ecohorror and how do they evoke the whales variously as horrible sea monsters, vulnerable sea creatures or powerful planetary saviours among other roles? The paper hypothesizes that, while the sperm whales’ biological capacity to swallow a human being impacts on the representations, the novels ultimately accentuate that both whales’ grievability (Butler), casting the animals as mysterious, monstrous, weird, eerie or grotesque creatures. The paper builds on the notion of “storying extinction” as an anthropomorphising strategy that “draw[s] readers into imaginative encounters with embodied, specific, and lively creatures to support situated ethical responses” (Bastian 2020 455; see Rose, Van Dooren and Chrulew; Haraway). Central to the paper is Melville’s chapter “Grand Armada”, which juxtaposes in the space of only a few pages the whale pod’s pastoral and Ishmael’s wonder, the birth of a whale and “Madame Leviathan’s umbilical cord” with the excessive human slaughter of the whales, and the final chapters when Moby Dick reverses the hunt and sinks the Pequod and its crew except for the first-person narrator Ishmael. The rest of the paper examines the adaptations of Melville’s imagery in Verne’s, Kraus’s, and O’Connor’s work alongside ecohorror films such as Jaws, Tentacles, or The Swarm.
Bio: Monika Class is Associate Professor in English Literature. She holds a doctoral degree in English Literature from the University of Oxford (awarded 2009). As a member of The Lund Environmental Humanities Hub, she currently researches contemporary water elegies. Her recent publications include the special issue ‘Embodied Approaches to the Novel in English in the journal English Studies (2023) and her forthcoming article “‘Every water has its own rules and offering’: An Amphibious Interpretation of Anne Carson’s Blue-Green Short Story ‘1 = 1’” in The Journal of the Short Story in English.
Candice Allmark-Kent (Independent Scholar), “Inscrutable Malice: Rewriting the White Whale through ‘Mocha Dick’, Moby Dick, and White as the Waves”
Abstract: In Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (2003), the whale biologist Hal Whitehead described Alison Baird’s White as the Waves (1999) as a “remarkable” novel. For him, Baird’s descriptions of complex sperm whale societies with language and culture “ring true.” They “may well come closer to the nature of these animals than the coarse numerical abstractions” of his “own scientific observations.” Uniquely, Whitehead proposed that the communication between science and literature should be “reciprocal,” with scientists using novels like White as the Waves as “hypotheses to guide our work.” For Baird’s novel, however, this potential remains unfulfilled. White as the Waves went out of print and had little impact on the environmental humanities or the study of sperm whales.
As a retelling of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), White as the Waves uses a biographical structure to explore the white whale’s perspective, experiences, and motivations. However, this zoocentric speculation is complicated by Melville’s own rewriting of Mocha Dick’s story, as reported by J. N. Reynolds for Knickerbocker magazine in 1839. Beneath these layers of authorship, there was once a real individual white sperm whale. Whether named Mocha Dick by Reynolds, Moby Dick by Melville, or Whitewave by Baird, the white whale’s actions have been reinterpreted and rewritten according to our changing attitudes. Throughout the centuries, however, the idea that the white whale was intentionally attacking ships has remained consistent.
Today, as we attempt to understand recent orca encounters with boats, the same interpretation continues to dominate headlines: orcas are attacking yachts. Yet, we still do not know the real motivations of Mocha Dick and other sperm whales who allegedly attacked ships in the nineteenth century, nor of White Gladis the orca and her companions currently accused of doing the same in the twenty-first.
Bio: Dr. Candice Allmark-Kent is the author of Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada: Practical Zoocriticism (2023). She is the Associate Editor for Literature for Sloth: A Journal Emerging Voices in Human-Animal Studies, an interdisciplinary peer reviewer for Society & Animals, and a writer for NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment. She also runs Compassionate Canon, a Twitch and YouTube channel about animals in games. She is currently an independent scholar, having previously taught at the University of Exeter.
Miryam Bernadette Danielsson (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour), “Orca Sinking! The Beautiful Soul’s Hollow Victory in Jaws”
Abstract: This paper argues that Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws concludes with a phenomenology of emotional emptiness that serves as a powerful parable for the modern environmental imagination. Using a framework synthesizing Kate Rigby’s concept of the “disaster imagination” and Timothy Morton’s critique of the “Beautiful Soul,” I trace the novel’s trajectory from a sublime encounter with the nonhuman to a narrative displacement that produces a consumable, and ultimately shallow, eco-horror. The infamous final sequence, in which the shark is drowning with Quint in its tow and Brody mechanically kicks shoreward, is not a narrative failure but a strategic one. The text effectively achieves Burkean sublimation of the ecological crisis, transforming it into a safely distanced terror. This process ensures cultural continuity by preserving the reader’s illusion of separateness. By analyzing the novel’s mechanical sympathy structure, its rendering of Quint as an unsympathetic eco-villain, and its refusal of reflection, I demonstrate how Jaws models a “disaster imagination” that gravitates toward resolutions that protect us from the true, messy entanglement of the Mesh. The “Orca” does not just sink in the narrative; our capacity for meaningful ecological responsibility sinks with it, leaving us afloat on the flimsy cushion of a resolved plot, yet adrift in the unresolved reality of our environmental condition.
Bio: Miryam Danielsson is a third-year PhD researcher examining how popular fiction translates environmental anxiety into narrative. Originally from Germany, her academic trajectory has been shaped by living in Austria, Sweden and now France. Her current work investigates how bestselling American novels of the 1970s, often masquerading as simple thrillers, processed burgeoning ecological crises, creating cultural narratives that continue to shape our perception of nature decades later.
Irene Sanz Alonso (University of Alcalá), “Tales from the Deep: Ecogothic Readings of Sharks”
Abstract: Fifty years have passed since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (based on Peter Benchley’s homonymous novel) was released and sharks are still present in popular culture as representatives of our fear towards what the depths of the ocean hide. Even though water covers most of the surface of our planet, the marine ecosystem remains an inhospitable environment that both scares and fascinates humans. One of the reasons why these two feelings mix is that, in spite of human efforts being directed towards conquering the universe, oceans are home to countless species that are unknown to us. Using an ecogothic lens, this presentation aims at looking at Gothic landscapes and elements in films in which sharks, or their ancestor the megalodon, function as improvised—and man-made/forced—environmental activists. My proposal is to analyze Deep Blue Sea (1999), The Meg (2018), and Meg 2: The Trench (2023), exploring their settings and how they portray the relationship between humans and sharks/megalodons. Furthermore, I will look at how these non-human creatures rebel against humans forcing us to reflect on the dangers of humans’ attempts to control and manipulate nature and the nonhuman creatures we share this planet with.
Bio: Irene Sanz Alonso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Philology of the University of Alcalá. Since 2008 she is a member of GIECO, a Spanish research group on ecocriticism, and since 2010 she has been a member of the editorial team of Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. Her main research interests are ecofeminism, science fiction, and fantasy, focusing on literature and on audiovisual products.
Ruth Bryant (Utrecht University) , “Spoils of Whaling: Commodifying Nature in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Arctic Genre Scenes”
Abstract: Dutch whaling played a foundational role in the rise of commercial whaling and the establishment of large-scale operations in the Arctic and Subarctic regions, positioning the Dutch Republic as a dominant whaling power of the seventeenth century. This article explores a group of seventeenth century depictions of the Dutch whaling industry, which I call Dutch Arctic genre scenes. As an understudied body, these paintings depict the complex mechanisms of the whaling industry, the Arctic landscape, and the Dutch dominance over both. These paintings, which appear to document human ingenuity and expansion, simultaneously render whales as commodified bodies, transformed into floating sources of oil. By isolating this class of painting, this article examines how the Dutch artists—Cornelis de Man (1621-1706) and Abraham Storck (1644-1708)—visually framed the Arctic as a space of economic opportunity, imperial aspirations, and normalized extractive activities. In doing so, the article traces these historical narratives of human exceptionalism embedded within Arctic genre scenes to the ongoing systemic violence embedded within global meat industries. The article concludes by purposefully re-centering of the perspectives of whales, emphasizing their socio-ecological relationships, agency, and resistance. In acknowledging the richness of whale life and culture, this article challenges the exploitative, human-centric logic that underpins Arctic genre scenes and their ideological legacies. This contemporary understanding of historical materials acts as a form of countervisibility, subverting the extractivist gaze and asserting alternative ways of seeing. By elucidating the ways in which whales have been falsely represented as passive, complicit creatures by Dutch painters, this article encourages a way of approaching Arctic genre scenes that acknowledges the tandem role of art and industry and the historic erasure of whale resistance to commodification.
Bio: Ruth Bryant is a Research Master’s student in Art History at Utrecht University, with a BA in Art History and Biology from Case Western Reserve University. Her research explores Early Modern Netherlandish art through ecocritical, global, and decolonial lenses. She has presented at the Graduate Humanities Conference (UU 2025), a Southeastern European silversmithing conference (Institute of Art Studies at Bulgaria Academy of Sciences, 2024), SUNY New Paltz Art Symposium (SUNY New Paltz, 2023) and co-organized the Canal to Cuyahoga symposium (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023), linked to the 2023 U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Ruth Bryant has recently published a DURARE blog on historical reconstruction fifteenth century recipes for imitation pearls.