When is a dolphin not a dolphin?

Conceptions of the dolphin are deeply embedded in classical mythologies, appearing as messengers of the gods, oceanic saviors, or sometimes even as the gods themselves in disguise. Furthermore, dolphins frequently appeared in art and literature, responding to and reflecting the numerous real encounters those ancient cultures had with this friendly oceanic mammal.

Despite all of that however, knowledge about the dolphin seemed to have slowly faded from the public memory – by the late sixteenth century, naturalists bemoaned the state of popular conceptions of the dolphin, a creature that had increasingly become more of a reference to a symbol than a real living animal. The advent of more formalized branches of biological study in the eighteenth century did surprisingly little to halt the cultural effacement of the dolphin we know today. This degradation reached its peak in this period, culminating in the name fracturing into the ‘dolphin of the ancients’ and the ‘dolphin of the moderns’. In this talk, Dr. David Hou traces the development of this taxonomic instability and proposes that it can be best understood through the era’s particular blend of utilitarian and aesthetic values.

Speaker: Dr. David Hou 
David Hou is a recent Ph.D graduate from McMaster University. His thesis, entitled “Troubled Waters: The Sailor, the Ship, and the Sea in the Eighteenth Century,” offers an ecocritical rereading of popular nautical literature of the long eighteenth century. The project reveals the rise of an amalgamated sailor-ship subjectivity that is at once powerful and vulnerable. It joins the burgeoning field of oceanic studies in re-situating the landscape (or seascape) at the heart of many popular eighteenth-century narratives. David is also interested in digital pedagogy, especially involving the use of technology to make English literary studies more legible and interesting to a wider audience.

Moderator: Dr. Peter Walmsley
Peter Walmsley has long studied Enlightenment British and colonial literatures and cultures, with an emphasis on science and technology.  He has published books on John Locke and George Berkeley, and may be found in McMaster’s splendid Archives and Research Collections, where he is exploring such topics as East India Company botany and Jane Austen’s depiction of meat-eating.

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