How sharks have been depicted over centuries and across cultures--and
what sharks see when they look back.
We encounter the world through surfaces: the screen, the page, our skin,
the ocean's swell. Here on the sea is the surfer, positioned at the edge
of the collapsing wave. And lurking underneath in a monstrous mirroring
is the shark. When the two meet, carving along the surface, breaking
through the boundary, death appears.
Steering her analysis from the newspaper obituary through literature and
past cinema, Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of the
human condition: our state of being between life and death, always in
precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers observes how
sharks have been depicted over centuries and across cultures, then flips
the lens (and dissects the cornea) to consider what sharks see when they
look back.
These refracted lines of inquiry--optical, philosophical,
historical--converge at the focal point where we can fix the image of
the surfer and the shark. This is the picture McCarthy frames: the
cartilaginous companions gliding together in a perfect model of how to
read, navigate, and exist.