- St. John's University
Department of English
8000 Utopia Parkway
Queens, NY 11439
Steve Mentz
St. John's University, English, Faculty Member
- I teach early modern / Renaissance literature and literary theory at St. John's University in New York City. Much of ... moreI teach early modern / Renaissance literature and literary theory at St. John's University in New York City. Much of my recent work has explored oceanic and ecological questions. My most recent book is a collection of essays on the great Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe. Forthcoming projects include a new monograph, *Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550 - 1719* and a collection of essays, *Oceanic New York*, that took shape in response to Hurricane Sandy's reminder of the maritime substrate of the city.edit
This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using their classrooms as a creative space for social formation and action. Its twenty-one chapters provide diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and... more
This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using their classrooms as a creative space for social formation and action. Its twenty-one chapters provide diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and early modern literature that engage innovation, collaboration, and forward-looking practices. They model ways of mobilizing justice with early modern texts and claim the intellectual benefits of integrating social justice into courses. The book reconceives the relationship between students and Renaissance literature in ways that enable them – and us – to move from classroom discussions to real-life applications.
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Shipwreck Modernity engages early modern representations of maritime disaster in order to describe the global experience of ecological crisis. In the wet chaos of catastrophe, sailors sought temporary security as their worlds were turned... more
Shipwreck Modernity engages early modern representations of maritime disaster in order to describe the global experience of ecological crisis. In the wet chaos of catastrophe, sailors sought temporary security as their worlds were turned upside down. Similarly, writers, poets, and other thinkers searched for stability amid the cultural shifts that resulted from global expansion. The ancient master plot of shipwreck provided a literary language for their dislocation and uncertainty.
Steve Mentz identifies three paradigms that expose the cultural meanings of shipwreck in historical and imaginative texts from the mid-sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries: wet globalization, blue ecology, and shipwreck modernity. The years during which the English nation and its emerging colonies began to define themselves through oceangoing expansion were also a time when maritime disaster occupied sailors, poets, playwrights, sermon makers, and many others. Through coming to terms with shipwreck, these figures adapted to disruptive change.
Steve Mentz identifies three paradigms that expose the cultural meanings of shipwreck in historical and imaginative texts from the mid-sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries: wet globalization, blue ecology, and shipwreck modernity. The years during which the English nation and its emerging colonies began to define themselves through oceangoing expansion were also a time when maritime disaster occupied sailors, poets, playwrights, sermon makers, and many others. Through coming to terms with shipwreck, these figures adapted to disruptive change.
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A collection of essays co-edited with Stephen Guy-Bray and Joan Pong LInton on the state of Nashe studies in 2013.
My book on Shakespeare and the ocean explores Shakespeare's dramatizations of the watery world, with special attention to literary representations of the sea from Homer to Melville to Walcott.
A study of the book market, prose romance, and the transmission of classical prose narrative from Heliodorus's *Aethiopian Historie* to the Elizabethan fictions of Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and Nashe.
A collection of essays on early modern "true crime" that I co-edited with Craig Dionne of Eastern Michigan University in 2004.
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In the future I want, I am a cormorant. A screeching sea-crow, I perch on a high branch on the Tree of Life over-looking Paradise. My eyes flare with greed, and with two senses of the word "want." Things appear down there,... more
In the future I want, I am a cormorant. A screeching sea-crow, I perch on a high branch on the Tree of Life over-looking Paradise. My eyes flare with greed, and with two senses of the word "want." Things appear down there, spread out below me, things that I lack ("want") and things that I desire ("want"). "Various" is the word for what I see. "A happy rural seat of various view" (4.247) is the full line in Paradise Lost, but it's just "various" that I crave.1 These three sylla-bles roll around inside my bird's mouth. Various. All of the things that inhabit this Paradise, laid out before me. Not just one thing, but another.
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The 10 excerpts below represent my contribution to Marina Zurkow's volume More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System) (Punctum 2016). More&More is an art and research project that explores the language and mechanics of global trade,... more
The 10 excerpts below represent my contribution to Marina Zurkow's volume More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System) (Punctum 2016). More&More is an art and research project that explores the language and mechanics of global trade, container shipping, and the exchange of goods. It questions a mercantile structure that by necessity disallows the presence of ocean as a real space in order to flatten the world into a Pangaea of capital. This book, More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System), is an experimental "brick" of a book that intervenes in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (also known as the HS Code). The HS Code is the internationally accepted standard of product classification, which codifies the way nations conduct import/export. All legal trade products (and illegal ones that find loopholes) are shipped using this system. More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System) lists the astonishing variety of items that are shipped around the world...
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A reading of sand, swamp, and shit in terms of a "brown" ecological vision, with reference to Spenser's Amoretti 75, Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and Borges's Chinese... more
A reading of sand, swamp, and shit in terms of a "brown" ecological vision, with reference to Spenser's Amoretti 75, Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and Borges's Chinese Encyclopedia, among others.
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The emotional connections that humans feel with other humans seem quite distinct from the ‘oceanic feeling’ that confronts us when solitary mortals face the great waters. Uniting these discourses requires drawing together the myriad... more
The emotional connections that humans feel with other humans seem quite distinct from the ‘oceanic feeling’ that confronts us when solitary mortals face the great waters. Uniting these discourses requires drawing together the myriad resources of sea poetry, canonical novels, and multiple theoretical traditions from Freudian psychoanalysis to the ‘blue’ (or oceanic) humanities and contemporary environmental studies. Shifting from narrowly human to post-human ways of understanding our human and nonhuman surroundings enables the novels of Austen and Cervantes to speak to the theoretical perspectives of Luce Irigaray, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey, as well as contemporary figures such as Allan Sekula, Karin Animoto Ingersoll and Christopher Connery. Principles of connection and ‘experience’ unearth new ways of imagining the relationships among humans and between humans and the nonhuman environment that seem particularly valuable in our own moment of ecological crisis and catastrophe.
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Research Interests: Art History and Art
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Research Interests: Art and Literature
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... My maritime work has also been supported by fellowships at several great libraries, including a short-term fellow-ship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a place that, like Shakespeare himself, contains more real salt than many think;... more
... My maritime work has also been supported by fellowships at several great libraries, including a short-term fellow-ship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a place that, like Shakespeare himself, contains more real salt than many think; a Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime ...
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... in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridgc.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/978052160863-3 © Alexander Leggatt 2005 This ... Three men have entered her body: her husband... more
... in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridgc.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/978052160863-3 © Alexander Leggatt 2005 This ... Three men have entered her body: her husband Bassianus, then the Gothic brothers. ...
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Page 1. The King is a Thing: Shakespeare in New York City, 2007 Steve Mentz Shakespeare Bulletin, Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 2008, pp. 149-166 (Review) ... n The King is a Thing: Shakespeare in New York City, 2007 Steve Mentz, St.... more
Page 1. The King is a Thing: Shakespeare in New York City, 2007 Steve Mentz Shakespeare Bulletin, Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 2008, pp. 149-166 (Review) ... n The King is a Thing: Shakespeare in New York City, 2007 Steve Mentz, St. John's University ...
... Students of the history of technology also point out that innovative technologies like cartography and navigation underwrote early modern expansion. 30 In literary scholarship, the study of technology has most recently meant... more
... Students of the history of technology also point out that innovative technologies like cartography and navigation underwrote early modern expansion. 30 In literary scholarship, the study of technology has most recently meant reinvigorated forms of 'book history' and 'print culture ...
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... Students of the history of technology also point out that innovative technologies like cartography and navigation underwrote early modern expansion. 30 In literary scholarship, the study of technology has most recently meant... more
... Students of the history of technology also point out that innovative technologies like cartography and navigation underwrote early modern expansion. 30 In literary scholarship, the study of technology has most recently meant reinvigorated forms of 'book history' and 'print culture ...
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Hollywood films such as Pixar’s Moana (2016) and Warner Brothers’ Aquaman (2018) have drawn on the aesthetics and stories of the island cultures of Oceania to inform their narratives. In doing so, these works have both succeeded and... more
Hollywood films such as Pixar’s Moana (2016) and Warner Brothers’ Aquaman (2018) have drawn on the aesthetics and stories of the island cultures of Oceania to inform their narratives. In doing so, these works have both succeeded and failed to respect and engage with oceanic cultural knowledge, providing a cultural vehicle to expand communication, while also exploiting Oceanic culture for financial gain. Cultural tropes and stereotypes pose a heavy intellectual burden that neither film fully shoulders, nor are the complexities of their content acknowledged. Moana sought to enlarge the franchise of the “Disney Princess” genre, but could not avoid issues of cultural appropriation and tokenism becoming entangled with an ongoing process of engagement. Moana’s desire to represent the cultural memory of Oceania raises questions, but while Pixar presents digital fantasy, Aquaman hides its global ambitions beneath star Jason Momoa’s broad shoulders. If the blue humanities is to follow the se...
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Hollywood films such as Pixar’s Moana (2016) and Warner Brothers’ Aquaman (2018) have drawn on the aesthetics and stories of the island cultures of Oceania to inform their narratives. In doing so, these works have both succeeded and... more
Hollywood films such as Pixar’s Moana (2016) and Warner Brothers’ Aquaman (2018) have drawn on the aesthetics and stories of the island cultures of Oceania to inform their narratives. In doing so, these works have both succeeded and failed to respect and engage with oceanic cultural knowledge, providing a cultural vehicle to expand communication, while also exploiting Oceanic culture for financial gain. Cultural tropes and stereotypes pose a heavy intellectual burden that neither film fully shoulders, nor are the complexities of their content acknowledged. Moana sought to enlarge the franchise of the “Disney Princess” genre, but could not avoid issues of cultural appropriation and tokenism becoming entangled with an ongoing process of engagement. Moana’s desire to represent the cultural memory of Oceania raises questions, but while Pixar presents digital fantasy, Aquaman hides its global ambitions beneath star Jason Momoa’s broad shoulders. If the blue humanities is to follow the se...
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S TUDIES of English Renaissance prose fiction have for some time languished between a critical narrative that has fallen out of favor -reading these works as "prehistories of the novel" -and the lack of attention given... more
S TUDIES of English Renaissance prose fiction have for some time languished between a critical narrative that has fallen out of favor -reading these works as "prehistories of the novel" -and the lack of attention given to idiosyncratic texts that are not part of an estab-lished tradition. ...
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Series Editors: Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia, UK & John McAleer, University of Southampton, UK Editorial board: Mary Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum, Sweden; Steven Mentz, St... more
Series Editors: Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia, UK & John McAleer, University of Southampton, UK
Editorial board: Mary Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum, Sweden; Steven Mentz, St John’s University, USA; Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen, Netherlands; David J. Starkey, University of Hull, UK; & Philip Stern, Duke University, USA
Early modern oceans not only provided temperate climates, resources, and opportunities for commercial exchange, they also played a central role in cultural life. Increased exploration, travel, and trade, marked this period of history, and early modern seascapes were cultural spaces and contact zones, where connections and circulations occurred outside established centres of control and the dictates of individual national histories. Likewise, coastlines, rivers, and ports were all key sites for commercial and cultural exchange.
Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400–1800: Cultures of the Sea welcomes books from across the full range of humanities subjects, and invites submissions that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. The series puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean.
Editorial board: Mary Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum, Sweden; Steven Mentz, St John’s University, USA; Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen, Netherlands; David J. Starkey, University of Hull, UK; & Philip Stern, Duke University, USA
Early modern oceans not only provided temperate climates, resources, and opportunities for commercial exchange, they also played a central role in cultural life. Increased exploration, travel, and trade, marked this period of history, and early modern seascapes were cultural spaces and contact zones, where connections and circulations occurred outside established centres of control and the dictates of individual national histories. Likewise, coastlines, rivers, and ports were all key sites for commercial and cultural exchange.
Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400–1800: Cultures of the Sea welcomes books from across the full range of humanities subjects, and invites submissions that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. The series puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean.
Research Interests: 17th Century & Early Modern Philosophy, Early Modern History, Renaissance Studies, Maritime History, Early Modern Europe, and 12 moreHistory of Renaissance Science, Renaissance literature, English Renaissance Literature, Fifteenth and Sixteenth century culture, Early Modern Art and Visual Culture, Early modern European history, hisory of science, history of religion, Maritime Cultures, Sixteenth Century History, Ottoman Maritime History, Blue Humanities, History of Science and Medicine In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and Global Renaissance
Tori Bush, Steve Mentz, Craig Santos Perez, and Brian Russell Roberts discuss recent books related to the place of water in the Environmental Humanities.