Marina Klimenko

How do waters signify? Pushing back against Roland Barthes’ claim that the sea “bears no message” (Mythologies 160) and is thus outside of semiological systems, my dissertation turns to Bruno Latour’s suggestion that waters might sign via mediators. But rather than staying with Latour’s laboratory instruments, I examine how the formal qualities of contemporary poetry and fiction written on these lands known as Canada might translate waters’ material properties into text. By thinking of waters as plural, I attend to the different histories, economies, and societies entangled with waters across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism and new materialisms, I examine how texts by Rita Wong, Thomas King, Ruth Ozeki, and Cecily Nicholson enact waters’ affordances to address the current environmental crises.

List of Publications

• Klimenko, Marina. "Beyond ‘The Last Doubler': Reproductive Futurism and the Politics of Care in Larissa Lai's The Tiger Flu." Neoliberal Environments, special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2020, pp. 161-180.

My short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Acta Victoriana, Toronto Prose Mill, Patchwork Mosaic, Victoria College's Goose, Half a Grapefruit, and The Wild Word.