Unraveling Seaspace: Decoding Environmental Knowledge in a Classical Malay Literary Corpus
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_2How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- sea; environmental knowledge; Classical Malay; corpus; concordance analysis
- ABSTRACT
This study approaches Classical Malay literature from an environmental perspective, focusing on diverging contexts and meanings across different spatial categories in the portrayal of the sea. Our primary data source was the Classical Malay literary corpus of the Malay Concordance Project. By employing a mixed-methods approach, combining distant reading techniques with thorough close reading, we were able to analyze a more extensive selection of texts compared to previous studies. As a result of this approach, we introduce three nuanced seaspaces, each symbolizing distinct spatial dimensions of the sea and connected to different symbols, contexts, and motifs. These seaspaces encompass (1) the sea’s mystic underwaters, (2) its human-centered shore, and (3) its connective midst. Through these seaspaces, we aim to demonstrate the sea’s wide range of meanings in Classical Malay literature, all of which are rooted in its heterogenous and multidimensional space. We consider these seaspaces to represent maritime environmental knowledge encoded and concealed in the large body of Malay literature which this study attempts to decode.
- Copyright
- © 2023 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Leon Woltermann AU - Ramayda Akmal PY - 2024 DA - 2024/01/11 TI - Unraveling Seaspace: Decoding Environmental Knowledge in a Classical Malay Literary Corpus BT - Proceedings of the Critical Island Studies 2023 Conference (CISC 2023) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 4 EP - 12 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_2 DO - 10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_2 ID - Woltermann2024 ER -