Geospatial Digital Technologies and the Crisis of the Literary 'Affect': Rethinking Physical Space in Online Cartographies (original) (raw)

Shifting Geo/Graphies : Between Production and Reception of Imagined Spaces

In Literature, spaces are neither definite nor static. On the contrary. The dialogic process linking literary production to its reception turns the text into a real 'contact zone', a 'third' space where the author's and the reader's imaginative geographies collide. In the interstice between these two instances opens up a 'space of flows' which prevents solidification and dogmatism. From his or her perspective, the reader can, indeed, alter the landscapes created by the author by blending them with his/her own. Proposing a reading of Le silence des Chagos (The Silence of the Chagos) by Mauritian writer Shenaz Patel, this paper will demonstrate how the entanglement of literary production and reception causes fictional geographies to shift.

Space, Postmodernism and Cartographies

1994

As the title suggests, this article will concern itself with contemporary attitudes towards space. What is less apparent, though, is the necessary relationship this will have with questions of subjectivity. I have spent many pages elsewhere examining this relationship 2 and shall only give a brief account of it here. The pressing question for this article to examine is the relevance of this discussion to the concerns of postmodernism. This essay will chart the movement between space, subjects and postmodernism. Space and Subjects The modern spaced-subject's story starts with Kant's Copernican Revolution. Just as Copernicus had marked the dawn of astronomical heliocentrism, so Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1787) announce the grounding of philosophical concerns within the bounds of a new a spatially constructed subject. (This is the accepted philosophical story anyway. That Kant was building upon a tradition of philosophical thinkers-Hume is the most famous example-is not the place for this article to contend.) What is most interesting about Kant's account is his integrating of the question of space and subjectivity. 3 Kant showed the ways in which a highly organised subject could be produced. But this is not a new subject. Hume, for one, had already identified the subject as the post-production addendum to the process of experiencing. Where Kant gleefully delimited this subject's boundaries with the aid of Rationality, it seems that Hue unhappily resigned himself to the stagnation of the subject through Habit (Hume 1982: 311-12). Subjective solidity has not always been beloved of philosophers. Schopenhauer's aesthetics tries hardest to dissolve that which produces individual subjects. Nietzsche provides many tirades against this subject. 4 Yet it is the Frenchman, Gaston Bachelard-writing one hundred and fifty years after Kant-who expands upon the space/subject construction in an attempt to enhance new forms of both. Bashelard's The Poetics of Space (1958) examines a range of human experience, as reported through the medium of poetry, in order to reach for that which defines the human subject. Unlike the phenomenologists, with whom Bachelard has always been associated-apparently with his approval-Bachelard's method was not to pare away at his area of study until its essence was exposed. Rather, he sought to amplify the examples of the poetic images he was interested in, to expand not inhibit the area on which he worked. For Bachelard the poetic imagination highlights the subject in its most creative capacity, and it is space that provides the best conditions for this creativity:

Digital Cartography and Feminist Geocriticism in Literary Studies

Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, 2021

This paper attempts a brief literature review through the history of literary maps to recent digital mappings, exploring geocriticism as an emerging literary theory in spatial humanities. The paper investigates the ways in which digital literary maps could be used in feminist criticism as feminist geocriticism to develop new ways in reading and analysing feminist texts. It also aims to propose "feminist geocriticism" as a methodology by which this intersection can be effectively utilized to identify and analyze the relations between the different socio-cultural female identities ("intersectionality" of Kimberley Crenshaw [4]) and space.

Digital Cartography and Feminist Geocriticism in Literary Studies A Proposal

Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, 2021

Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity (2008)

2008

The last fifty years have witnessed the growing pervasiveness of the figure of the map in critical, theoretical, and fictional discourse. References to mapping and cartography are endemic in poststructuralist theory, and, similarly, geographically and culturally diverse authors of twentieth-century fiction seem fixated upon mapping. While the map metaphor has been employed for centuries to highlight issues of textual representation and epistemology, the map metaphor itself has undergone a transformation in the postmodern era. This metamorphosis draws together poststructuralist conceptualizations of epistemology, textuality, cartography, and metaphor, and signals a shift away from modernist preoccupations with temporality and objectivity to a postmodern pragmatics of spatiality and subjectivity. Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity charts this metamorphosis of cartographic metaphor, and argues that the ongoing reworking of the map metaphor renders it a formative and performative metaphor of postmodernity. Contents: Introduction: Text–Map–Metaphor - Postmodern Metaphor - Postmodern Text - Postmodern Cartography - Text–Map–Metaphor 1. A Genealogy of Cartography, a Genealogy of Space - Genealogy–Archaeology and the Spatializing of History - Maps of Modernity: Cartography as a Science - Medieval Mapping - Renaissance Mapping - Enlightenment Mapping - Imperial Mapping and the Postcolonial - "Postmodern" Cartographies 2. Subjectivity: The Cartographer as Nomad - Subjective Accounts: Enlightenment Theories of Subjectivity and the Critique of Cartesianism - Nomadic Subjectivity - Nomadic Cartography/Nomadic Art - Nomadic Fictions - The Desert: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient - The Steppe: Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars - The Sea: Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry 3. Mapping the Labyrinth: Twentieth-Century Cartography and the City - Cognitive Mapping and the City - Walter Benjamin and the Flâneur: 1920–1940 - The International Situationists: 1952–1972 - Cognitive Mapping: Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson - The City and the Map in Later-Twentieth-Century Literature - De Certeau and Spatial Stories - Michel Butor's Passing Time - Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities - Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion 4. Metamorphoses of the Map - Dionysus, Metaphor, and Metamorphosis - Metamorphosis, The Metamorphosis, and the Question of Metaphor - The Metamorphic Map Reviews: "Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity is one of the most impressive pieces of scholarly work I have read in years. It is strikingly innovative—and that is no mean trick given that the topic has been much discussed recently. What makes this study so important—that is, such a major contribution to the field—is its remarkable combination of meticulous research, wide philosophical scope (from Descartes through to Baudrillard), theoretical sophistication (regarding theorists ranging from Benjamin to Foucault), and what I can only call brilliant close readings of literary texts. I should add that, to my knowledge, this is the first full and serious study of the postmodern cartographic imagination and it is certainly the first to set it in its rich historical and theoretical context." --Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto "Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity counts among the most telling treatments of cartography, metaphor, and space available in English. It is complete in itself, of a totality that it might prefer not to own but for which every one of its readers will be grateful. . . . it is a guide, indeed a viaticum, for the reading of space in contemporary theory and fiction." --Tom Conley, Professor of Romance Languages and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University "This is an exciting book addressing the changing spatiality of literature in current times. An innovative account of the ‘spatial turn’ and its significance in contemporary cultural studies, using cartographic metaphor and practice to illuminate current theorisation. It develops a leading account of the blending of cartographic and literary imaginaries in postmodern culture, offering an exciting journey in which the social theory of representation is reframed by locating its spatial performativity. It will be an asset to readers in fields from literary studies, to cultural studies to geography." --Mike Crang, Reader in Geography, Durham University

'Spaces and Places: Around the Globe'

In the Victorian era the English novel unsettles conventions of representation. It does so by favoring stories about unsettled, displaced characters, and by disturbing its readers with uncomfortable depictions of imperialism abroad. The interlinked levelsformal, figurative, interpretivethrough which we can approach the novel's engagement with colonial spaces provide myriad ways of surveying Victorian narratives of empire.

Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History

In a period marked by the Spatial Turn, time is not the main category of analysis any longer. Space is. It is now considered as a central metaphor and topos in literature, and literary criticism has seized space as a new tool. Similarly, literature turns out to be an ideal field for geography. This book examines the cross-fertilization of geography and literature as disciplines, languages and methodologies. In the past two decades, several methods of analysis focusing on the relationship and interconnectedness between literature and geography have flourished. Literary cartography, literary geography and geocriticism (Westphal, 2007, and Tally, 2011) have their specificities, but they all agree upon the omnipresence of space, place and mapping at the core of analysis. Other approaches like ecocriticism (Buell, 2001, and Garrard, 2004), geopoetics (White, 1994), geography of literature (Moretti, 2000), studies of the inserted map (Ljunberg ,2012, and Pristnall and Cooper, 2011) and narrative cartography have likewise drawn attention to space. Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space Throughout History, following an international conference in Lyon bringing together literary academics, geographers, cartographers and architects in order to discuss literature and geography as two practices of space, shows that literature, along with geography, is perfectly valid to account for space. Suggestions are offered here from all disciplines on how to take into account representations and discourses since texts, including literary ones, have become increasingly present in the analysis of geographers.

Spatiality's Mirrors: Reflections on Literary Cartography

The project of literary cartography is fraught with peril, as the urge to produce accurate maps confronts the specters of not only the impossible, but the undesirable. As with Borges’s fabulous geographers who developed a perfectly useless map coextensive with the territory it purported to depict, such mimetic scrupulosity thwarts the project of literary cartography as well. The hero’s itinerary is traced along the map that is formed, at least in part, by those itinerant tracings, while the epic narrative gives shape to the world’s spaces. Like Odysseus, the bard who would sing the world into being must connect the itinerary to the map, blending lived experience with that imaginary geography to form a rhapsodic totality. Or like Dante, who pauses to study geography in the midst of his own infernal trajectory, the literary cartographer must construct an architectonic by which the otherworldly system can make sense, such that the spaces revealed are also the spaces produced in the narrative. Or like Ahab, whose relentless pursuit of the “inscrutable thing” at the heart of the white whale inscribes his own mission with indelible markings, as his mapping project proves wholly reflexive. In all these ways, literary cartography represents and produces a world system for the reader to explore. Drawing upon key scenes from the Odyssey, the Inferno, and Moby-Dick for this essay, Tally reflects on literary cartography by examining the interrelations among the itinerary and the map, narrative and description, perception and abstraction, lived experience and the social totality.

Contemporary Geopolitics and Digital Representations of Space

Croatian International Relations Review, 2018

This research is premised on two theoretical constructs: that maps do not objectively depict space and that traditional cartography produces a geopolitical narrative. The research aim is to investigate geopolitical influence in modern, digital representations of space, and vice versa. This paper is divided into three parts: In the first, the digital representation of space is introduced and explained, and two widely acknowledged digital cartographic services are established as the empirical foundation of the research – Google (Google Maps and Google Earth), designed by cartographic and geo-data professionals, and OpenStreetMap, built through crowdsourcing. In the second part, the geopolitical features of traditional cartography are discussed in the context of digital mapping, including ethnocentricity and hierarchical representations of space, similarities to geopolitische karte, and " minor geopolitics. " The final part asks and answers a key question about geopolitical subjectivity: " Who benefits from the geopolitical narratives in digital representations of space? "

Geospatial Digital Technologies and the Crisis of the Literary 'Affect': Rethinking Physical Space in Online Cartographies (original) (raw)

Related papers