Dion Jones

Prof J. Pressman

ECL 305; Literature and the Environment

14 September 2025

Water and Other Worlds

This weekend’s readings from “The Penguin Book of Mermaids” as well as Steve Mentz’s “Blue Humanities” and “Deterritorializing Preface” focus on other worlds and re-centering our thoughts with that in mind. Current, Water, Flow, Ship, Seascape, distortion, and Horizon each shift language. It alters our perceptions through changing our relationships with/monitoring the relationships our adjusted centers have and the expectations related to them. 

The comparison between terra—the familiar, land centered—and “oceanus”—the “alien”, water centered—connects to ideas of periphery and otherness that have been prevalent in previous readings (Deterritorializing xv). Merfolk—tritons, mermaids—marked new worlds as beings that acted as extensions of alien places for Europeans amidst the ‘age of discovery’.