Theory Underwater: Diving into Wild Blue Media

For their Spring 2022 Humanities Forum, the Dresher Center for the Humanities presents

Melody Jue, Associate Professor, English, University of California, Santa Barbara

What would media and literary studies look like, underwater? In her recent book, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater, Melody Jue shows how the ocean can be a science fictional environment for defamiliarizing concepts in media studies, offering cold and briny contexts in which to rethink the “interface” and “inscription.” Placing her own experience of scuba diving in conversation with science fictions and diving memoirs, Jue demonstrates how the buoyancy of the ocean can be a useful milieu for rethinking the relation between orientation and interpretation. By becoming more aware of the terrestrial bias that we bring to the study of media, Jue calls for an ecocritical practice of “milieu specific analysis,” a way of attending to the environmental conditions of interpretation and embodiment beyond the desk.