Teaching Space, Place, and Literature

Robert Tally Jr., Robert T. Tally Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138046979
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351693974
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Space, place and mapping have become key concepts in literary and cultural studies. The transformational effects of postcolonialism, globalization, and the rise of ever more advanced information technologies helped to push space and spatiality into the foreground, as traditional spatial or geographic limits are erased or redrawn. Teaching Space, Place and Literature surveys a broad expanse of literary critical, theoretical, historical territories, as it presents both an introduction to teaching spatial literary studies and an essential guide to scholarly research. Divided into sections on key concepts and issues; teaching strategies; urban spaces; place, race and gender and spatiality, periods and genres, this comprehensive book is the ideal way to approach the teaching of space and place in the humanities classroom.

Part I
Plotting courses

1
Space Odyssey

From place to lived space

Gerhard van den Heever

Introducing a journey through space: a report on teaching

It is with some justification that an exposition on course design on the topic of space should start with the term “introduce,” since intro (into) and ducere (to lead) imply a collective movement – in this case – into space, the condition of being spaced (i.e., spatiality), and the idea of a journey as an ekstasis, a transgression of boundaries. Spatiality, space, and odyssey – the three terms thus not only evoke senses of placement but also movement, such that movement implies changed positionalities with all the attendant implications for how the Real manifests and becomes the theatre for the unfolding of being-in-context or existence-in-context. It is this double sense of simultaneously being in place and coming to place that is the underlying conception to this particular course design that was called “Space Odyssey,” that is, teaching a spatial odyssey is deliberately constructivist. Thus, human being-in-context or existence-in-context is also culture in the sense of cultivate (Latin: colere, cultura, to make grow) so that being-spaced is not an unmediated condition imposed on human existence but arises from the very world-constructing that is human existence.

It is probably trite to state the obvious, namely that the course takes its title from the iconic 1968 film co-written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, The Sentinel (Clarke co-wrote the film script), which on the surface dealt with travel into deep space (to the moon and to the planet Jupiter) but also reflected on matters relating to human interaction with the surrounding world – artificial intelligence, technology, evolution, and existentialism as approach to existence. As the philosopher and theoretician of architecture, Karsten Harries, explained, the film spoke about (outer) space on two levels: the domain of transcendence, the longing for the ecstatic, the sublime as the encounter with a totally other, the numinous as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans; but also as the desire for the experience of the beautiful, of being at home.¹ As such, it is not only a story about transgression of physical boundaries but also a transgression of conceptual boundaries. Hence the evocation of this film in the title of the course as an indication of transgression of disciplinary boundaries in the pursuit and operationalizing of a trans-disciplinary study of spatiality. As film – and as narrative – 2001: A Space Odyssey illuminates an aspect of thinking space and spatiality in the context of architecture (“the art of constructing space” from archi – chief – and tekton – builder, i.e., the person responsible for the intentional planning of the construction of space) that moves beyond the formalist, aesthetic, and technical, into language and signification as the ground from which spacemaking in architecture “takes place.”² From these conceptual grounds and origins, “Space Odyssey” was a somewhat anomalous course taught in the context of a program in architecture in that it was designed not to focus on architecture as technical art, but as cultural work, more specifically architecture as a set of practices in the context of cultural discourses and philosophies of representation which will also highlight the socio-cultural politicality of the spacemaking endeavor.³ That architecture is also cultural work – and therefore at home in cultural discourses – is more than adequately illustrated in the monograph of Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture, on the way in which philosophy and cultural theory intersects with architectural theory and practice.⁴

Spatiality: the event of being-space

The thinking of space and spatializing starts not with a set of fixed ideational orientation points (or fixed and static theoretical perspectives) that encapsulate the “truth/s” of space but with creative movement, which movement is best expressed in the gerund of spatializing, theorizing, conceptualizing, all indicating the processual nature of the constructing taking place (hence “event of being-space”). The positing of space and spatiality as a core feature of human cogitation of the world – and its embodiment in the human and social sciences since the middle of the 20th century in the rise of the intellectual movement known as the New Left – is an epiphenomenon of that groundswell of political reorientation defined by the multiple and varied reception history of Marxist-materialist thinking. The “Marxist” and “materialist turn” in human and social studies in the roughly 150-year-long reception history of materialist approaches to history, society, and culture, in its turn engendered a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion that, in this context, can be typified as the effects of the localized – emplaced, contextualized – spatiality on knowledge production, a theoretical stance that has since inflected many human and social science disciplines. If the title of the project, “Space Odyssey,” signaled transgression of boundaries, it is fitting to start any theoretical conceptualization of space and spatiality with reflection on the very process of thinking space in a transgressional manner, the making of a field of study that does not confine itself to narrow boundaries, that does not adhere to disciplinary limitations. Thus, this was meant as an exploration of the field of spatiality studies in its widest reaches and range: thinking the formation of a trans-discipline.

By general consent, the originary moment when the significance of thinking space was forcefully enunciated as program for the human sciences, is the 1967 lecture by Michel Foucault “Des Espaces Autres,” published in English in 1986 as “Of Other Spaces.”⁵ The lecture opens with the statement that “[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.”⁶ In contrast to the 19th century with its “obsession with history” as linear development and “ever-accumulating past” the present epoch is the epoch of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, intersections, of elements connected in an ensemble of relations in which they mutually implicate each other – the world as configuration. This not only set in train a new way of understanding the world but also a new way of understanding space. If a new conception of space and spatiality arises under specific historical conditions, then space can be thought of as a social construct. This brought about a shift in the human sciences to the so-called “spatial turn.” In contrast to older debates on the nature of space, the new post-structuralist conception of space is one of relationship and the event of relationing: “Conversely, socially constructed, poststructuralist notions of space entail the metaphor of networks, such as the internet, which are forever partial, incomplete, and never fully known.”⁷ In the context of the spatial turn described by Wharf and Arias, space assumes the character of constitutive relationing. The spatial turn implies conceiving space as a social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena. Understanding space and spatiality – where things happen – is essential for understanding why and how things happen.

When conceived of as events of relationing, space and spatiality serve not only as connectors of elements in fields of meaning, space also serves as junction or connector of frameworks for the understanding of connected elements – in fact, the very fact of networks of connections demands networks of perspectives. Therefore, spatial thinking operates in a broad range of disciplines. When space is theorized, as for instance, in the entry for “space/spatiality” in the New Oxford Companion to Law, scholars draw from a range of theoretical sources, including queer theory, urban political economy, actor-network theory, and cultural studies – spatiality discourse is essentially inter- and transdisciplinary in character.⁸ Inversely, space and spatiality inflects a range of disciplines from cultural sociology, human geography, urban studies/urban planning, cultural geography, biblical studies and religious studies, literature studies, and critical spatiality theory. The example from the intersection of space and law is instructive: if law is the collective noun for the rules of cohabitation, the foundation of all social life, then space circumscribes the constitutive complex of formations that give rise to the social – “law and space are both socially produced and socially productive.”⁹

Spatiality is socially produced space. Scholars of spatiality reject the Kantian division between space and society. Spatiality is not simply an outcome of social forces but is itself constitutive of society and politics. Such arguments challenge the modernist tendency to treat time and history as the privileged vector of enquiry, the effect of which was to treat space as inert or passive.

Intellection and cognitional culturing are cultural practices even as are the “products” of such intellection – what we know and how we come to know it (and know that we know it) are human constructs. As the entry for spatiality states in The Dictionary of Geography, spatiality is

[t]he effect of space on actions, interactions, entities, and theories. “Spatiality is a social construct, not an exogenously given, absolute coordinate system… but a product of the political economic system.”¹⁰ “Spatiality is constitutive of the particular ways in which the different modalities of power take effect. The two major dimensions of spatiality are reach and intensity.”¹¹ “From the perspective of spatiality, space and society do not gaze at each other but rather are mutually embedded.”¹² The term is also used as a synonym for distribution, or spatial expression.¹³

Space – social space: the spatiality of being human

The idea that space is constitutive relationing and a fundamental constitutive part of the construction of the social, is forcefully expressed in two seminal essays (and the “spatial metaphors” they center on) by the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. The two essays are “Bauen Wohnen Denken” and “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” and the two metaphors occurring as central to the argument are that of the bridge and the Greek temple.¹⁴ With the bridge metaphor Heidegger turns the idea of space away from spatium and extensio, the technical, the measurable, to that which relates, binds together. The Greek temple in Heidegger’s metaphor is the event of the manifestation of the Fourfold, the manifestation of the mutual calling forth of gods and humans, sky and earth as Er-eignis, both as event and as claim. Bauen /building as wohnen /dwelling implicates the historical instantiation of the play of Being and world, Being understood as the worlding of world/welten der Welt. As worlding, Being emerges in a Bewandtnisganzheit, a network of meaning-generating relations.

Space in Heideggerian understanding does not evoke material quality but rather functions as a relational concept – how things relate and mutually let each emerge into unconcealedness (from the Greek alētheia, truth, lit. wrought from forgottenness) in order to stand in the light of truth as what they are. The open space where this “revelation” takes place is the open clearing of language, hence the essential linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) of Being. Thus, at the core of the Being-event are acts of representation (ranging from artworks as objects, through speech to literature, conceived in the widest possible sense). Language as shared truth-revealing is the foundation of Mitsein, being-together, since Being is not something – an object – that humans possess; rather the truth of Being and beings emerge in the course of human history as the discoursed emplaced unfolding of the understanding-reception of the truth of Being and beings, in the culture-making of humans constructing their world. The social produces space, and in its effect-ness it highlights the interaction between space and human action. Spatiality denotes the idea that rather than space being a backdrop to social life, it is constitutive of social life. Spatiality as relationality is a function of Being and Mitsein.

In his doctoral dissertation, “Die verskynsel woon: ’n wysgerig-antropologiese studie,”¹⁵ Frederik J. Engelbrecht combines these Heideggerian insights with the work of the Dutch psychiatrist, Jan Hendrik van den Berg, who with his concept of metabletica (lit. the doctrine of changes) demonstrates how reality (Being itself) changes across historical epochs, which changes manifest in representations of new conceptions of being human, new understandings of the world, as well as new ways of human comportment with culture and society.¹⁶ Engelbrecht appropriates van den Berg’s work in order to show how very ordinary spaces and spatial domains (e.g., threshold, dwelling: a new inside and new spirituality) are not only constructed in acts of representation, but as cultured also retro-construct spatialized ways of experiencing the world and making social worlds.

The spatial imagining of worlds

After maintaining that space is socially constructed and a cultural “artifact,” the question remains how spatiality as relationality comes to be constituted. At stake is the embodied locationing and locatedness that produce an affectively-laden comportment with space. In this process, representation and narrative are two of the most important domains where the construction of v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the map and the guide
• PART I Plotting courses
• PART II Representing space and place
• PART III Critical domains
• Index