Turning Fiction into Reality: The Making of Two Places Within Literary Geography (original) (raw)
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Mapping the Imagination: Literary Geography
2017
Mapping the Imagination: Literary Geography originates from a conference I organized at the University of Salerno (Italy) in March 2014. I am very grateful to all the participants. Thanks to their work, the conference was a success, and a stimulus for me to carry this project to the next level. 1 The seven articles in this special issue of Literary Geographies deal with British, U.S. and Canadian Literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The issue begins with the work of Italian Canadian poet and novelist Mary di Michele in 'Langscape: Language, Landscape and Memory, the Origins of a Poetics'. This article explores the nuances of her double belonging, and her connection to her place of birth in Abruzzo and to the Italian language. The articles move on to examine the treatment of space through a variety of texts and approaches, but all consider space and landscape to function as metonyms. In the articles, space serves important, even though often under-explored narrative roles: it can constitute the center of attention, a carrier of symbolic meaning, an object of emotional investment, a means of calculated planning, and a source of organization. The essays here show how 'narratology and geography can gain from cross-fertilization,' and the product could be an encompassing theory of space in which 'space and narrative intersect not at a single point, but rather converge around … interrelated issues' (Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu 2016: 3). The articles are part of a renewed conceptualization and analysis of the notions of space in works of literature and poetry, and build upon theories of space and place that made up what was known as the 'Spatial Turn' in the 1980s and 1990s. In a general sense, 'space' is the dimensional, physical extent occupied by human beings (OED). In contrast, 'place' is space that we know and 'endow with value' (Tuan 1977: 6). The process of turning 'space' into 'place,' this form of personal and psychological
Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction
Modern cartography has the ability to map almost any phenomenon for which spatial relationships are of primary relevance. While existing cartographic products cover already an enormous variety of topics, the visualisation of ‘other’ geographies gains more and more attention. These other geographies may not accord to the ‘normal’ spaces usually mapped, hence cartography is both challenged and forced to find uncommon solutions. Literature and its fictional spaces might serve as a fi ne example (but one could also think of soundscapes or emotions). Doubtlessly, the realm of fiction is defined by different ‘rules’ to the geography that cartography customarily addresses. This paper deals with two main questions: Firstly, how to map narratives and their complex spatial structure? Secondly, what do we achieve by mapping literature? By searching for some (provisional) answers, the horizon of a promising interdisciplinary research field – a future literary geography – becomes visible.
Relational Literary Geographies: Co-Producing Page and Place
2016
This themed section of Literary Geographies emerged from a Social and Cultural Geography group sponsored session at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society (including the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference. The session invited papers that investigated the ways in which geographies of fiction co-produce the real and imagined places around us. It invited scholars to explore the complex relations which produce the 'geography of fiction' (Piatti & Hurni 2011:218), specifically the ways through which page and place are co-produced in reading and writing practice. In using the term 'geography of fiction', Barbara Piatti and Lorenz Hurni write in the tradition of Franco Moretti (1998); they are interested in how we cartographically produce the imagined world of fictional texts. Here we use 'geography of fiction' to initiate a different journey into the fields of literary geography and literary studies. Our journey is less concerned with cartographically rendering the fictional world and more interested in examining how the real and imagined come together and brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Contemporary Nordic Literature and Spatiality
2020
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.
A short position paper outlining some of the key features and concerns of this emergent interdisciplinary field. Published in issue 1 of Literary Geographies, a peer-reviewed, open access e-journal: http://literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/issue/view/2
Reading Places: The Geography of Literature
Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, 2.3 (July 2013), 97-120. ISSN (online) 2278-9642 | Print 2278-9642.
A discussion of place in literature, which draws on cultural geography anda which particularly focuses on novels by Amitav Ghosh and R.K. Narayan.
Crafting 'Literary Sense of Place': The Generative Work of Literary Place-Making
Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2018
This paper examines the how of literary wheres. As makers of literary works, creative writers are tasked with evoking place on the page. While the nexus of place and literature is increasingly recognised as fertile scholarly ground, the specifics of how writers actually “make” literary places remain opaque and under-researched. I seek to address this gap by exploring how literary place is constituted through creative practice. Focusing on the work of Australian writer Tony Birch, I document a range of generative tools creative writers may use to produce what I call “literary sense of place”. Drawing on interview-based case studies and key concepts from human geography, I analyse how these practitioners harness various “off-page” modes of enquiry to evoke place compellingly in textual form. While my main focus is creative practice, I also examine the resultant literary texts to help illuminate how process manifests in content. By profiling a range of “place-oriented experiential techniques (POETs)” – including site visits, memory, direct encounters, sensory attentiveness, “vicarious emplacement”, socio-cultural understandings, and happenstance – I present a fine-grained account of literary place-making from a practitioners’ perspective. I conclude that producing literary place is a generative, cumulative and associative process, in which writers mobilise a rich array of lived sensations, emotions, memories, understandings and actions. In foregrounding these “backstage” modes of creative labour, this paper helps clarify how writers deploy both personal and shared experiences to render literary place in resonant ways.
Introduction: Storied Spaces of Contemporary Nordic Literature
Contemporary Nordic Literature and Spatiality, 2019
Every story is a travel story-a spatial practice." This sentence by Michel de Certeau (1988, 115) states the starting point of this volume, which traces the spatial tracks and trails of contemporary Nordic literature in order to map the imaginative geographies of the region. Moving from Danish to Swedish fiction, from Finnish to Norwegian literature, Contemporary Nordic Literature and Spatiality invests both in describing the specific cartographies of recent Nordic fiction and in fabricating methodological and conceptual ways of studying its spatial practices. The citation by de Certeau refers to his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, and especially its chapter titled "Spatial Stories." Like de Certeau and several advocates of literary spatial studies, this book also underlines the importance of spatial features relating to settings, locations, orientations, or textual spatiality. Literature is as much spatial as it is temporal. In addition to the idea of literature as a spatial story, we wish to suggest another
The Role of Place in Literature
Themes in literary criticism move in and out of focus, influenced by wider cultural trends that sometimes derive from sciences like psychology, ecology, and physics; or through periodic drifts in sociopolitical arenas like Marxism and democracy, or gender-equality. The nation has been the dominant socio-cultural construction of the last few centuries, a verity which has significantly influenced both production and analysis of literature. The relatively recent advances in communicative technologyair travel, internet, cellular phones, GPS, and so onmodify conventional notions of place and time, peoples, and communities. These transformations command new cultural perspectives in the same way that they have resulted in new citizenship and migration laws, economic models, and educational pedagogies. 1 Moreover, postnational characteristics percolate through Hemingway's novels, yet critics often employ American categorizations to the man's life and texts, and this construct has long been a principal axis of investigation, in spite of his distancegeographic, cultural, and linguisticfrom the constraints of that label.
Towards an Assemblage Approach to Literary Geography
2016
Over recent years literary geography has adopted a relational approach to its subject matter. This article continues this move, suggesting that assemblage theory can help develop the sub-discipline in two interrelated ways. Firstly, at a project level, assemblage theory enables literary geographers to identify all components that have agency and influence over the power of fiction (including authors, translators, publishers, readers, places, etc). As part of this first argument, the article develops Hones’ concept of reading fiction as a ‘spatial event’ (Hones, 2008, 2014). This article interacts with Hones’ textual ‘happening’ and seeks to emphasise the valence of the spatial event of fiction on reader relations to material and social geographies. It offers a short case study from the work of novelist Tessa Hadley to illustrate aspects of this valence. Secondly, at the sub disciplinary level, the article argues that assemblage theory may offer a common ground which allows scholars ...