Relational Literary Geographies: Co-Producing Page and Place (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Turning Fiction into Reality: The Making of Two Places Within Literary Geography
2013
The authors discuss the creation of literary places, based on people’s perceptions of a locality arising from their relations to particular writers and their texts. The analysis is grounded on two case studies: Ogulin in Croatia, which is the birthplace of Ivana Brlic-Mažuranic, a renowned writer of fairytales, and Sel in Norway, the place where Sigrid Undset’s heroine of the historical novel Kristin Lavransdaughter spent her youth. Both cases rely on materializing the writers’ fictional universes within specific localities. Although they emerge in different contexts, these literary places exhibit common determinants that provide additional insight in the placemaking process.
The Map and the Text The Geo-Literary Spatial Encounters in Literary Theory
مجلة بحوث کلیة الآداب . جامعة المنوفیة, 2019
Geography and literature are impressed by their respective disciplinary cultures. However, they witness the emergence of contact zones that subvert the boundaries caused by the cultural divide between these two discrete disciplines. The paper discusses five encounters emerged in the wake of the spatial turn in the 1990s: geography's literature, narrative cartography, geocriticism, geo-poetics, and eco-criticism. The-the map and the text‖ is a spatial trope that becomes a diegetic paradigm, a structuring agent, and a signifying element in literary theory. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to illuminate the methods, objectives, divergences and convergences of these interdisciplinary encounters. Author's Bio-Note Wael M. Mustafa lectures in Literary Theory at Fayoum University, Egypt. His main research interests are in postmodern literary theory; postcolonial translation studies; literary journalism; eco-criticism; spatial literary theory; and Postpostmodern literary theory. Recent publications include a book entitled The Politics of Subversion (2010).
Literatureâs Sensuous Geographies
2015
Series description: 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
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
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 ...
Thinking (about Literary) Spaces: Ideas from the Cambridge Literary Geographies Conference
Literary Geographies journal was first published in 2015 with a commitment to encouraging ‘cross-fertilisations at the juncture where geography and literature meet’ (Hones et al. 2015: 1). This commitment is nowhere more apparent than in the number of special issues in recent years which have grown out of conference panels. After all, conferences are spaces where, unleashed temporarily from the disciplinary shackles which constrain our day-to-day working lives, cross-fertilisations can be seeded and can grow. This special collection of Thinking Space pieces is no different. The short but compelling pieces collected here are the product of a conference on literary geographies held in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in March 2017. This international gathering of geographers, literary scholars, literary cartographers and literary geographers was greatly encouraged by the editors of this journal to further the intellectual interactions between scholars working in this discipline – and to better help its advancement. In this introduction to the eleven Thinking Space pieces collected here I provide a context for the ideas they put forward and they debates they illuminate.
Fact and Fiction: Metafictive Geography and Literary GIS
Literary Geographies, 2018
During the past decades, the ontological and epistemological frameworks of literary geography have altered remarkably. J. N. L. Baker argued, back in 1931, how fictive literature can be perceived as a container of geographic facts – a viewpoint that prevailed for several decades. The cultural turn of the late 1980s was widely critical of this 'naïve realism', seeing it as an attempt to find 'fact' from 'fiction' while at the same time ignoring the textual constructiveness completely, as if books were somehow 'transparent' (Brosseau 1995: 89-90). Ever since, the focus of geographical studies of literature has turned more towards the questions of how space is constructed, consumed and interpreted through different kinds of textual strategies and semiotic systems. Where this leads is to the primary question of how the concepts and connections of 'fact' and 'fiction' should be comprehended, a topic, which is particularly central and multidimensional in the studies of metafictive geography (see Ridanpää 2010a) and literary GIS. These are two distinct and very different theoretical approaches for understanding the connections of space and literature. In metafictive geography the attention is on how spatial imaginativeness and consciousness of a text's own imaginativeness become merged, while in literary GIS the challenge is on how to make spatial imaginativeness and its literary representations coordinatable. What these two approaches demonstrate, each in their own unique way, is that reading literature is essentially an experimental process in which the categorical distinction between the frames of 'fact' and 'fiction' become blurred.