'True Places Never Are': Navigating (Trans)Oceanic Imaginations in 'Moby-Dick'

Abstract

The concept of authentic spaces where original cultures and primordial nature coexist in unwitting harmony emerged in early romanticist works, only to be exploited by nativist discourses that called for racial and geographical hierarchies during the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper navigates literary mappings and (trans)oceanic spatial imaginations through the example of Moby-Dick. It aims to highlight the complex and understudied historical and contemporary dimensions of spatialization in literary and cultural discourses and exemplify how they can be made productive in the field of American Studies

Biographical Note

Steffen Adrian Wöll (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)

Since October 2016, he has been employed at SFB 1199, where he expanded his literary and cultural background from American Studies. He completed the initial phase with his dissertation titled “The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse.” Beginning in early 2020, he has been employed as a Postdoctoral Researcher, investigating the transoceanic expansion processes of the USA from 1880 to 1940 and their reflection in literary texts.
This research emphasizes the comparability and interconnections between spatial conceptions of the transpacific and circum-Caribbean expansion spaces, as well as their convergence at geostrategic focal points such as the Panama Canal. In addition to analyzing spatial conceptions, formats, and arrangements, his focus areas include representations of agency, ethnicity, and otherness. Articles on these and other topics have been published in various scholarly journals and collections.