Reading adrift : at the beach with David Wills

Abstract

This article takes as its provocation the claim that reading is ‘adrift on an ocean’ as it sets out to find and to follow the sea in David Wills’s work. Engaging with Prosthesis and Dorsality, it explores the significance of thinking about reading in relation to the sea while also examining what it might mean to ‘read’ the sea itself. Performing its own prosthetic drift, it moves through Wills’s work into other texts and contexts, drawing on the writings of Italo Calvino and engaging with traditional practices of oceanic wayfinding to argue that if the sea is to be ‘read’ then it should be read as a language; as a language that is always already prosthetic, and through a reading that is always already adrift.