2025/01/02 by Charlie Blake · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Theological Perspectives and Practices #Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1080/0969725x.2025.2454834
openalex publication_date 2025/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/02/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
In “A Hymn to Tethys: Chronofabulation and the Emptiness of Ancient Oceans,” the intimate connections between the human encounter with the sea in its various moods and phases, the experience of the passing of time on a human scale, but also on the geological and cosmic scales of deep time, and our propensity as a species for fictionalizing or fabricating as a way of orienting ourselves through language and imagery in the face of mortality and loss, areas explored through a theory-fictional or ficto-critical narrative based around the concept of chronofabulation. Chronofabulation on one level is here concerned with the use of philosophically oriented storytelling as a form of time travel, in which the ocean is both a constant thematic background and a central character in the story, whilst on another level it is about divination – or divine dissipation – as a kind of philosophizing; an understanding of the divinatory process that is also, in the senses considered here, a prolegomenon for an oceanic materialism. In using a theory-fictional approach to time and the sea, this paper is responding to recent critical thinking on the consequences of post-critique in the theoretical humanities as a route to investigate and test out new ways of deploying literary-philosophical immersion to navigate Nietzsche’s “new seas,” which for him were, and from this perspective are for us now, the truly open seas of a future beyond the inherent nihilism of modernity. In doing so, and in terms of methodology, it takes seriously the idea of treating theory and literary-philosophical discourse in the form of a kind of graphic novel, but a graphic novel without any images, on the assumption that readers will supply their own images and visual and contextual continuities as they read, and in doing, so engage directly with the oceans and their philosophemes as revealed in the process of reading and writing as chronofabulation.