Dr Robin MacKenzie – Scenes from the Shoormal: The Shoreline as Topos in the Work of Some Contemporary Scottish Poets

The Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at CU FA cordially invites you to a guest lecture by Dr Robin MacKenzie (University of St Andrews) entitled “Scenes from the Shoormal | The Shoreline as Topos in the Work of Some Contemporary Scottish Poets.” The lecture will take place on Wednesday, 18 October 2023 in Room 111 (CU FA main building) at 2:10 pm.

Abstract

“If, as Franco Moretti claims, geography is ‘an active force that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth’, it comes as no surprise that the topos of the shoreline looms large in the poetry of the British Isles. From ‘Lycidas’ to ‘Dover Beach’ to ‘The Waste Land’, the littoral zone has been a constant presence in the English poetic tradition; it features, if anything, even more prominently in modern Scottish poetry, with Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘On a Raised Beach’ as perhaps the most celebrated example (at least in the English language).

Foregrounding notions of liminality and materiality, as developed in the article ‘Drift’ by Icelandic archaeologist Þóra Pétursdóttir, I discuss in this presentation a number of shoreline poems by four contemporary Scottish poets (Roseanne Watt, Kathleen Jamie, Jen Hadfield and – more tangentially – Robin Robertson), teasing out affinities and contrasts in their depiction of the littoral zone and the drift objects washed up there. This leads on to some reflections on broader ecocritical issues arising from the texts discussed, most notably the tension between an ethically informed perspective that draws a clear distinction between ‘good’ (natural, biodegradable) and ‘bad’ (synthetic, polluting) drift objects, and an aestheticizing tendency that presents even those polluting objects as in some sense beautiful or evocative. This ‘disturbingly aesthetic’ element, as Pétursdóttir calls it, can be found in Pétursdóttir’s own photographs of Eidsbukta beach and in Watt’s filmpoem ‘Raaga’, with which I end my talk.”

Dr Robin MacKenzie is an Honorary Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews. The lecture is organized as part of the strategic partnership between Charles University and St Andrews.