“HAT MAN SICH nicht ringsum vom Meere umgeben gesehen,” Goethe reflects after sailing from the Italian mainland to Sicily in 1787, “so hat man keinen Begriff von Welt und von seinem Verhältnis zur Welt” (WA I/31:90; Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea have no conception of the world or their relation to it). Today, some two and a half centuries later, Goethe's words ring true in an unexpected way. Rising sea levels, ocean acidification, offshore oil spills, plastic pollution, and overfishing— to name just a few of the Anthropocene's catastrophic effects on the blue planet—assert ever more urgently water's intimate embrace of past, present, and future life on earth. I n our time, Goethe's maritime musings offer an untimely reminder of the sea's physical and political presence, as well as a watchword for those who, under the moniker of “blue humanities,” have begun to emphasize the ocean's importance for ecocritical inquiry. Steve Mentz, coiner of the term “blue humanities,” certainly echoes Goethe's oceanic insight when he insists that “as our planet gets bluer—as the sea rises and floods our coastal cities—we will benefit from a blue humanities perspective.”

At turns aesthetic, historical, feminist, queer, media-theoretical, posthuman, and postcolonial, the blue humanities perspective is as fluid as the sea itself (Interdisciplinary osmosis is also common, being one of the blue humanities’ siren songs.) Uniting adherents is a dedication to questioning traditional cultural narratives which, in John R. Gillis's words, “imagine human history as beginning and ending on terra firma.” By reframing human (and nonhuman) origins and futurities among the elements, blue humanities scholarship opens brave new worlds of thought. M entz describes the “shock of novelty that comes from jolting one's mental habits and practices into a new [oceanic] structure.” For Melody Jue, undersea spaces shake up “normative habits of thinking and speaking about the world that belie our terrestrial acculturation.” Bodies of water, from this perspective, also fall under Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's category of the unexpected body: their visceral difference—be it of an “alien,” “monstrous,” or “wondrous” aspect— challenges cultural and discursive norms. This applies not only to “aquatic humanoids” like mermaids, selkies, and proteuses whose slippery bodies “raise questions about what it is to be human and what lies beyond a human centered world.”