Water Words: Cultural memory, conservation, and the environmental imagination in English literature for Saudi schools

Abstract

Water is at once a physical necessity, a cultural archive, a religiously resonant sign, and an urgent educational concern. In Saudi Arabia, where aridity, groundwater pressure, desalination, climatic uncertainty, and changing patterns of consumption converge, water education cannot be confined to scientific facts or behavioural instructions. It also requires forms of attention capable of making hidden infrastructures, inherited memories, and more-than-human relations imaginatively present. This article develops a curriculum-oriented framework for reading water in English literature within Saudi secondary education. Rather than conducting discourse analysis of existing school textbooks, it offers comparative close readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Alice Oswald’s Dart. Across these works, water appears as unusable abundance, damaged urban memory, tidal temporality, and polyphonic river agency. The article introduces cultural hydroliteracy to describe the capacity to interpret water simultaneously as material resource, infrastructure, cultural memory, ethical relation, and climate-sensitive system. It then proposes a four-stage pedagogical sequence—remember, attend, compare, and act—that preserves literary complexity while connecting interpretation to Sustainable Development Goals 4, 6, 12, and 13. Literature does not automatically produce conservation behaviour, and the article makes no such causal claim. Its more credible contribution is to deepen perception, unsettle habits of entitlement, and give learners a language through which global literary traditions can be placed in dialogue with Saudi water histories and contemporary responsibilities.