Respondent: Margaret Cohen, Professor of English, Stanford 

“Sounding; or, Recovering the Role of Touch in Antebellum Seascapes”

Article Abstract: 

This article explores the motif of sounding in Antebellum maritime literature, and more specifically in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville. I posit that, before it became a psychological metaphor, sounding was first and foremost a nautical practice which was tackled as such in maritime literature. It was the maneuver that sailors performed when vision proved insufficient to navigate safely. I propose to recuperate the sense of touch in this motif as it brings into play sailors who feel, surfaces that are felt, and lead lines that make the sailors feel – and feel their way along the coast. I contend that sounding, in Antebellum texts, is a form of contact and encounter with the landscape, but also a relational mode of knowledge.

Through the reading of texts by Cooper, Dana and Melville, this article seeks to explore how sounding has been developed in maritime fiction as an alternative mode of knowledge, different yet complementary to vision. The first two parts on J.F. Cooper’s The Pilot (1824) and R.H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) analyze how sounding enables these two authors to reflect upon alternative political and social foundation through the tactile performance of sounding. Parts 3 and 4 focus on Melville’s Redburn (1849) and Cooper’s The Crater (1847) and question, along with these texts, the limits of sounding as a mode of knowledge-production that would give access to some deep truth. Published in the late 1840s, Melville’s and Cooper’s texts suggest that the depths plummeted by the lead line may not be that deep after all, and the knowledge they give access to may well be doomed to remain superficial knowledge.

Registration Link:

https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYrd-GorjgrG9JWP9sISEPBVWO6bGVB4urC