Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth: (Maritime Literature and Culture)

Shipwreck Narratives: Out of Our Depth studies both the representation of shipwreck and the ways in which shipwrecks are used in creative, philosophical, and political works. The first part of the book examines historical shipwreck narratives published over a period of two centuries and their legacies. Michael Titlestad points to a range of narrative conventions, literary tropes and questions concerning representation and its limits in narratives about these historic shipwrecks. The second part engages novels, poems, films, artwork, and musical composition that grapple with shipwreck. Collectively the chapters suggest the spectacular productivity of shipwreck narrative; the multiple ways in which its concerns and logic have inspired anxious creativity in the last century. Titlestad recognizes in weaving in his personal experience that shipwreck—the destruction of form and the advent of disorder—could be seen not only as a corollary for his own neurological disorder, but alsoan abiding principle in tropology. This book describes how shipwreck has figured in texts (from historical narratives to fiction, film and music) as an analogue for emotional, psychological, and physical fragmentation.  

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction.- Part I. Historical Narratives.- 2. An Incidental Dystopia: The Wreck of the Batavia (1629).- 3. Captain of a Shipwreck: The Wreck of the Wager (1741).- 4. The Limits of the Law: The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1791).- 5. Remembering William Mackay: The Wreck of the Juno (1795).- 6. The Cannibals and the Butterfly: The Wreck of the Medusa (1816).- 7. King Baba’s Largesse: The Wreck of the Winterton (1792).- Part II. Representations.- 8. James F. Cobb and Daphne du Maurier in Cornwall.- 9. Stephen Crane and James Hanley’s Open Boats .- 10. Proximity in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.- 11. John Steinbeck’s ‘Lifeboat’: An Unfinished Journey 12.- Making Room: The Lifeboat, an Invidious Motif.- 13. The Inner Wreck in Sheila Fugard’s The Castaways 143 Coda.- 14. Soundings: Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno’s Titanics.- 15. Politics in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s The Sinking of the Titanic.- 16. ‘The Endlessly Sinking Ship’: Günter Grass’s Crabwalk.- 17. Regarding Lampedusa.- 18.Jacki McInnes’s Urban Wreck.- 19. Constructive Wrecks.- 20. Postscript: Thinking from the Sea.

About the Author :
Michael Titlestad is Personal Professor in the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has published widely in the fields of South African literature, apocalypticism, whiteness and jazz. He is the author of Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage and is the co-editor (with David Watson) of The Ongoing End: The Limits of Apocalyptic Narrative. He is also the editor of English Studies in Africa, the most widely read literary studies journal in South Africa.