"Rewritten Water Myths in Times of Global Warming" Conference: This international symposium will explore the affordances of rewritten mythologies for thinking with and through water in our current era of climate crisis.

In Serpent, Siren, Maelstrom & Myth (2023), Gerry Smyth links the importance of sea stories to the 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on the endangerment of the world’s oceans. According to Smyth, retelling and interpreting sea myths helps to underline the centrality of the ocean to planetary health. Other contemporary writers, artists, and filmmakers have also remade and reinvented water mythologies both within and beyond the sea as a way of grappling with our current oceanic crises. Guillermo de Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) rewrites the 1954 film Creature from the Black Lagoon and casts the aquatic creature as the scared amphibian god of Amazonian communities. Jave Yoshimoto’s colorful paintings feature figures such as Venus and Godzilla in scenes of coastal disaster. Madeline Miller retells Homerian myth from the perspective of her eponymous heroine in Circe (2018), while Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020) interweaves the Greek Oceanid Clymene with her grandfather’s identification as Atlas as she reflects on dolphin hybridity and history and how remembrance can push back against consumer destruction. And in Gun Island (2019), Amitav Ghosh revisits a 17th-century Bengali folk epic about a gun merchant who flees the anger of the snake goddess Manasa Devi in a story of contemporary environmental crisis that brings together climate refugeeism, storms in the Sundarbans, flooding in Venice, and the plight of whales and dolphins stranded by dead zones.

These works of literature and film testify to the relationship between myth and environmentalism. Jan A. Kozák’ s “Climate Change and Myth” (2023) argues that certain now-lost myths about spiritual wisdom point to resilience and more harmonious imaginaries and relationships with nature and among people. Esther Sánchez-Pardo’s and María Porras Sánchez’s collection Myth and Environmentalism: Arts of Resilience for a Damaged Planet (2024) further emphasize that myth remains open to change and transformation and that myth is adaptable to different times. Moreover, many rewritten myths, such as The Shape of Water, overlap with recent calls for hopeful stories in sustainability studies. The turn away from doom and collapse promises to stimulate individual and structural action. The film also points to the specific wisdom of myth that de-centers the human and concomitantly draws attention to the slow violence of human exploitation and contamination in the Americas. Yet, current research in the environmental humanities is just starting to think about the relationships between water and myth. 

Our symposium aims to bring together scholars across different humanistic fields and disciplines, and take up mythical intertextuality and adaptation studies as well as representations of water, human connectedness with water, time and water cycles, story as flow in and across various media, gender fluidity, aquatic power and aquatic mobility, and last but not least transformed aquatic heroines and heroes, with the goal of examining how rewritten myths can encourage us to think and live with the water in less anthropocentric terms. 

The deadline for the submission of abstracts has passed. You can find the CFP below.

 

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Our updated contact is: rewrittenwatermyths2026@englund.lu.se .

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