A dive into classic sea stories with Dr Kevin Riordan

How are classics relevant to our modern life in Singapore? How do sea stories reflect cities’ contemporary characters? Yale-NUS Senior Lecturer of Humanities (Literature) Kevin Riordan unpacks such questions in his series of talks based on the theme ‘The Seas Around Us’.

The fourth season of the lecture series titled A Bridge to the Classics is led by Dr Riordan, who specialises in modernism and world literature. It is part of an initiative by The National Library Board (NLB) Singapore that aims to familiarise the public with literary classics and their modern-day significance. The four lectures delve into the timeless works of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether and The Shadow-Line, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, and Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation.

Dr Riordan giving a lecture at the Central Public Library. Image by Tey Rachel for Yale-NUS College.

An author himself, Dr Riordan has been based in Singapore since 2013. Previously, he taught in Japan, the United States of America, and the United Arab Emirates. In this article, Dr Riordan comments on the lecture series with NLB and shares his perspective on classics.

Could you share a brief introduction of yourself and your areas of specialisation?

I joined Yale-NUS in August 2023, but have been in Singapore for over a decade, previously at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). My research is on theatre and world literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly tracing how people, books, and ideas move, sometimes together and sometimes apart. Pulling a lot of this work together, my first book was a literary and theatrical history of modern circumnavigation.

How did this collaboration with NLB come about? What inspired the theme of this series?

NLB has done four of these “seasons” now. They have impressive public programmes, and for this one they ask academics to give enthusiastic, public-facing talks for curious readers, in hopes of demystifying the classics and encouraging readers to dig into some old or new curiosities. Yale-NUS College’s own Associate Professor Andrew Hui participated in the first season, with the theme of ‘Books within Books’; the second season was on Asian speculative fiction, the third on Japanese literature. I was honoured to be invited for the fourth season, and we discussed a few different possible themes, settling on, ‘The Seas Around Us.’ Looking at maritime literatures gives me a flexible way to think about literature’s arrivals and departures for local (and global) readers. We also thought it might be of interest, with the academic emergence of the Blue Humanities and ecocriticism, and, more generally, given anxieties about rising and polluted seas as well as a renewed local investment in island and archipelagic heritage.

From what you have observed, what are some common misconceptions or stereotypes that people have about the classics?

I join the other presenters in playfully questioning the assignment, of what makes a classic. Associate Professor Deborah Shamoon at the National University of Singapore (NUS), for instance, started with Tale of Genji (an obvious classic) but closed with Rose of Versailles (a manga). Classics can seem old and stodgy, the kind of thing you read in school or are told to read, but rarely pick up for fun. They are typically old and usually from distant contexts. “Classics” also stand-in for the shelf of books that we might, in our contemporary moment, want to decolonise, disregard, or at least reframe. In this programme, we want to show how and why certain books have a long, varied history of readings, interpretations, and contestations (one definition of a classic) – and also wonder about some emergent cases or works at the margins.

Why were these books chosen for the talks?

I think these books are all rewarding experiences, but they also somehow write beyond themselves, inspiring questions and further reading. Each one is only debatably a “classic” (!). I wanted to open up that question with my audience and fellow readers: Verne is very popular, but not atas enough to be classic; some of Conrad’s works (especially Heart of Darkness) are bona fide classics, but does that mean his lesser-known works should be too? Carson is a science writer. How and when do we consider non-fiction literary? And Rachel Heng’s novel is well-received, but isn’t it too new to be a classic? These debatable classics are all united in how they connect with the “seas around us,” having some arrival and departure in Singapore. They are also “outsider” works in different ways (even Heng’s) – maybe all literary classics are…? The fluid borders—the tidelines—keep shifting, and stories give us some navigational guidance.

What is your favourite book from the series and what makes it stand out to you?

It depends on which one I’m reading at the moment! I’ve enjoyed Heng in part because so many other people are reading it now too. She did a reading on the Yale-NUS College campus last August and another event with NLB; a student in my Literature At Sea class last semester wrote a wonderful essay about it; Yale-NUS College alumna Aleithia Low published an essay about it in Jom… While it might be contentious (too soon) to call it a classic, the novel’s own historiography—its reflections on what we preserve and destroy—opens a discussion for what we might call a literary classic’s conditions of possibility (though that is sounding more academic than this series should be!).

What are your hopes for the attendees of your talks? What do you expect them to take away from the lecture?

I hope attendees find something surprising, something that jars how they read these and other books. For example, for the first lecture, I shared a graph comparing days-to-pages from Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Seeing it, one might be led to ask, how do I experience temporal flow when I read? Someone else might’ve been curious about comparing translations; or thinking about S Rajaratnam’s varied writings as speculative fiction; or how the telegraph changed how we tell stories (compared to the telephone, the television, the internet). And if said reader is inspired to check out some other new book (whatever it is) from the newly renovated Central Public Library – they’re already in the building! – I’ll judge what I say a success.