Moby-Dick, the Ocean, and the Literary Origins of Silent Spring

Talk by Michele Navakas (Miami University, Ohio/SDU Odense)

Abstract

This talk is drawn from my book-in-progress about the reading practices of American ecologist and author Rachel Carson (1907-1964), whose Silent Spring (1962) launched modern American environmentalism by exposing the toxic properties of pesticides and popularizing the concept of ecology. Drawing on archival research on Carson’s life and work, the book makes the case that some of Carson’s most influential ecological knowledge emerged from skilled practices of literary interpretation that she learned in childhood, then later developed in combination with her professional training in biology. As I’ll show in this talk, Carson’s lifelong fascination with Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) allows us to grasp one of her most important lessons for our contemporary moment: Our planet’s warming is intimately tied to our capacities to interpret what we read.

Bio

Michele Navakas is Professor and Co-Director of the Literature Program at Miami University, Ohio, where she is also an affiliate of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability. Prof. Navakas is the 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar at the Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark. Prof. Navakas’s books include Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, 2023) and Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), winner of two book awards from the Florida Historical Society.