April 24th
Dr. Hester Blum (English, Pennsylvania University) will present “Polar Ecomedia: Print Culture in the Arctic and Antarctica.” What happens to messages left in bottles? Or in cairns, or in copper cylinders, or with passing ships? Blum’s paper discusses the history of Anglo-American polar exploration–as well as the literature produced by the expedition members–by considering how letters and other forms of knowledge circulate in the ecological spaces of the polar regions. What forms of writing and recording practices are sustainable in the Arctic or in Antarctica? We might say that polar expeditions functioned as a mechanism for generating narratives, but in the anthropocene, writing on ice may be scarcely more legible than writing on water.
