TY - JOUR
T1 - "Are Mermaids Real?"
T2 - Rhetorical discourses and the science of merfolk
AU - Goggin, Peter
N1 - Funding Information:
Interestingly, the scientific community itself is rife with mermaid metaphors and references. For example, Mermaid Purses, the egg casings of skates, are published on in numerous scholarly zoology, biology, and planetology journals and in popular science and natural history magazines. Likewise, sirenomelia, or Mermaid Syndrome, the rare congenital condition in which the lower limbs of a human foetus are fused together and resemble a mermaid tail, is published on in journals of pathology, genetics, obstetrics and gynaecology, and journalistic venues (Sikandar and Munim, 2009). Princeton University’s Mobile Earthquake Recorder in Marine Areas by Independent Divers - or MERMAID Project - is sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and the UK National Environment Research Council (Schieltz, 2016). These examples represent but a few metaphors that directly invoke conceptions of mermaids that various fields of scientific research draw on.
Publisher Copyright:
© Shima Publications (Australia).
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The question 'are mermaids real'? would appear, on the surface, to be fairly straightforward to answer, at least for those more inclined to base belief on verifiable facts and scientific evidence of phenomena. As such, this question posed by the USA's National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration appears to be rhetorical rather than designed to elicit an actual answer. But a deeper rhetorical analysis of the discursive boundaries that presumably exist between popular culture and scientific discourses reveals that the mermaid question is far more complicated. This article addresses and unpacks the discursive spaces of science, prediction, myth, popular culture, and metaphor and argues that the boundaries that are permeated by constructs of merfolk are far more porous then they may seem at first glance.
AB - The question 'are mermaids real'? would appear, on the surface, to be fairly straightforward to answer, at least for those more inclined to base belief on verifiable facts and scientific evidence of phenomena. As such, this question posed by the USA's National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration appears to be rhetorical rather than designed to elicit an actual answer. But a deeper rhetorical analysis of the discursive boundaries that presumably exist between popular culture and scientific discourses reveals that the mermaid question is far more complicated. This article addresses and unpacks the discursive spaces of science, prediction, myth, popular culture, and metaphor and argues that the boundaries that are permeated by constructs of merfolk are far more porous then they may seem at first glance.
KW - Discourse
KW - Fiction
KW - Mermaids
KW - Metaphor
KW - Reality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058880638&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85058880638&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.21463/shima.12.2.04
DO - 10.21463/shima.12.2.04
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85058880638
SN - 1834-6049
VL - 12
SP - 13
EP - 23
JO - Shima
JF - Shima
IS - 2
ER -