The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space

Robert Tally Jr., Robert T. Tally Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317596936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The "spatial turn" in literary studies is transforming the way we think of the field. The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space maps the key areas of spatiality within literary studies, offering a comprehensive overview but also pointing towards new and exciting directions of study. The interdisciplinary and global approach provides a thorough introduction and includes thirty-two essays on topics such as:

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• Spatial theory and practice

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• Critical methodologies

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• Work sites

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• Cities and the geography of urban experience

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• Maps, territories, readings.

The contributors to this volume demonstrate how a variety of romantic, realist, modernist, and postmodernist narratives represent the changing social spaces of their world, and of our own world system today.

Part I
Spatial theory and practice

1
In, of, out, with, and through

New perspectives in literary geography

Marc Brosseau

Geography’s relationship with literature is no longer a disciplinary oddity. Seminars, special sessions in annual conferences, special issues of geography journals, and collective books see the light every year. Review papers, chapters in cultural geography textbooks, entries in human geography dictionaries or encyclopedias, and the publication in 2015 of the first issue of the journal Literary Geographies all bear witness to the greater legitimacy and relevance of this relationship. As much as it was somewhat marginal or peripheral until the 1970s, geographers’ use of literature is normalized as a disciplinary practice, so much so that we are now hearing calls to redefine the terms according to which the relationship should be established; while some think it is time for a new “state of the union” so to speak (Bédard and Lahaie, 2008), others believe it is necessary to “reforge” the connections (Saunders, 2010). These efforts at redefining what literary geography should be about are neither the first nor, to be sure, the last. However, past and future sources of renewal most often come from a combination of approaches that did not meet until a certain point in time. Since the turn of the 1990s, the growing number of interlocutors has contributed to the emergence of new ways of conceiving and approaching literature and, consequently, new ways to respond to emerging questions. The more recent renewal of the relationship between geography and the humanities can only accelerate this process (Daniels et al., 2011; Dear et al., 2011; Tally, 2013; GeoHumanities, 2015).

Literary geographies, geographies of literature

Following fairly modest beginnings stemming from isolated contributions, and infrequent and mostly unheard calls, geographers’ recourse to literature took root during the 1970s with the advent of humanistic geography. For the best part of the next twenty years, the relationship between geography and literature remained mostly ancillary, the latter having been instrumentalized by the former in order to legitimize competing approaches in human geography. Regional geographers extended their analysis of hard empirical facts by separating the factual wheat from the fictional tares in regional realist literature (Gilbert, 1972; Salter and Lloyd, 1977). In an effort to reinstate human subjectivity, experience, creativity, meanings and values as essential themes of geographical inquiry, humanistic geographers were inspired by the ability of great authors to capture the intricacies of spatial experience and sense of place (Tuan, 1978; Pocock, 1981). For their part, radical geographers denounced social and spatial injustices expressed by an ideological superstructure mirrored in good and bad literature (e.g. proletarian or bourgeois) which serves to diffuse and legitimize it (Cook, 1981; Silk, 1984). In a way, one could say that this triangular tug of war between “facts”, “experience” and “ideology” corresponded to an internal debate within geography, literature simply being another terrain in which to wage the dispute (Brosseau, 1994). The early 1990s, which correspond to what has been referred to as the “cultural turn” in the social sciences on the one hand, and to a “spatial turn” in the humanities on the other hand, created very fertile ground for renewed interdisciplinary exchange, which had profound impacts on ways to conceptualize literary geography.

It would be misleading to say that the three approaches alluded to earlier have simply vanished with the advent of the so-called new cultural geography of the 1990s. Although they no longer occupy center stage, they explore new themes that address contemporary concerns: the factual or documentary value of literature continues to enrich geography’s pedagogical or historical endeavors (Baker, 2003; Dennis, 2008); the humanistic search for vivid experiences of place now examines novels dealing with migration or exile (King et al., 1995); and the fragmentation of ideological discourse along a growing number of identity-defining factors (not only class but gender, ethnicity, sexuality and their complex intersections) has reoriented the radical impulse towards the politics of difference and identity in literary representation. Yet, geography’s cultural turn also prompted more profound transformations in ways to approach literature from a geographical perspective. Despite its greater diversity, it is possible to identify two main lines of inquiry within contemporary literary geography. In taking the specificities of literary language and the worlds of fiction more seriously, the first line of inquiry approaches literature as a kind of alternative geographic epistemology. The second examines literature from a broadly defined sociological perspective and treats it as a form of discursive intervention in the cultural and spatial politics of identity and difference (Brosseau, 2009).

The idea of approaching literature as a kind of alternative geographic epistemology emerged at a time when geographers became acutely aware of the formal discursive dimensions of geographical practice. In drawing attention to their own discursive and textual practices (rhetoric, textuality, poetics of research, etc.), they ceased to view the relationship between geographical thought and language in purely instrumental ways (Berdoulay, 1988). It is in this context that I propose to think of the relationship with literature dialogically as the meeting of two distinct sets of discursive forms and, more specifically, to think of novels as geographers in their own right, who generate geographies from within (Brosseau, 1994, 1995, 1996). This new approach constituted an invitation to shift the focus away from the author and the context, onto the text itself, and to acknowledge its ability (a form of agency) to define its reader. The alternative character of those fictive geographies does not stem from their documentary value, the exceptional creativity of the writers, or the ideological biases related to their class affiliation; it is found, rather, in their particular use of discursive and narrative possibilities (poetic language, style, narrative techniques, literary conventions, montage, composition, etc.). In the process, it became necessary to involve literary criticism in order to make this relationship between form and content more concrete or explicit (Matthey, 2008; Hones, 2011a).

The second line of inquiry is to be understood in the context of geography’s more intense engagement with British cultural studies on the one hand, and with postcolonial studies along the lines traced by the seminal writings of Said on the other. Focusing on the politics of cultural representation in general and literary representation in particular, postcolonial studies have sought to unpack the role of space and place in the dynamics of identity and difference at various scales. Literature plays a key role in the circulation, reproduction, naturalization and/or legitimization of social representations that are themselves entangled in complex and more or less diffuse relations of power. Authors are neither extraordinary creators articulating universal truth about the human condition, nor simple producers conditioned by their positions in an overarching social structure; they are embodied social subjects articulating their positionality (in terms of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality) within broader sociospatial contexts (Cresswell, 1993; Hughes, 1999; Jazeel, 2005; Stainer, 2005; Tavares and Brosseau, 2013). In return, to varying degrees, authors are also defined by those contexts. Despite their differences, all these studies propose to consider literature and its analysis as interventions in the cultural politics of representation that take active part in the constitution of identity and social difference.

From a more distant vantage point less preoccupied by the internal debates within literary geography (contentiously understood here as the study of literature by geographers), Michel Collot defines its scope as being composed of three distinct, yet overlapping, fields of inquiry:

Indeed, the term “literary geography” covers diverse orientations that we should distinguish while trying to articulate them: geographical approaches which study the spatial context in which literary works are produced (a geography of literature) or which identify the geographical “reality” to which they refer (geography in literature); geocritical approaches that analyze the representation of space and its signification in texts per se; and geopoetic approaches that focus on the relationship between literary creation and space, but also on the forms in which they are expressed. Three different dimensions of literary space correspond to these three level of analysis, which themselves undercut the three facets of the linguistic sign (signifier, signified, referent): its moorings in real places; the construction of an “imaginary universe” or of a “landscape”; and the spatiality of the text.

Collot, 2014, 11, my translation

Conceptualized in this way, we could say that geographical research seeking to separate facts from fiction in literature corresponds to what Collot identifies as “geography in literature”. Humanistic approaches focusing on the meaning of place, for instance, would fall under the label of “geocritical approaches”, while radical geography’s interpretation of literature in light of the social conditions within which it is produced constitutes a form of “geography of literature”.¹ Finally, the constellations of research that attend to the formal aspects of literary discourse which allow fictive geographies to take shape would enter into a kind of geopoetic approach.²

My objective here is not to renew or update previous reviews of the field (Jones, 2008; Brosseau, 2009, 2011; Saunders, 2010; Hones, 2014). Rather, inspired by the template Collot proposes, I would like to identify some of the most promising overtures in literary geography. While some emerge as particularly insightful integrations of the three above-mentioned approaches, others open fairly new lines of inquiry. I will first try to appraise the benefits of the study of literature to deepen our understanding of multiple forms of geographical imaginations. I will then turn my attention to geography’s engagement with various literature genres (crime fiction, short story and autobiography) to highlight the epistemological gain that can be made from taking generic conventions seriously. Finally, I will try to highlight the originality of studies which seek to broaden the field of literary geography by “stepping out of text”, often with the help of insight from the sociology of literature. These studies attend to the spatial dimensions of literary reception, considering the text as an “event” (Hones, 2008) or, more generally, to the spatial and social conditions of production, creation and reception of literary text (Saunders, 2010; Molina, 2014).

Literature and geographical imaginations

Looking for imaginative insights in literature is probably as old as modern geography; Humboldt himself (considered by many as the “father” of the discipline) devoted two chapters of the Cosmos to literature and painting (Bunkse, 1981; Lévy, 2006). In the English-language tradition, J. K. Wright is probably the first geographer to have explicitly argued that literature constitutes a rich and insightful source for geographical inquiry (Wright, 1924, 1947). When literature “finally” became something more than a peripheral object of study with the advent of humanistic geography, it was also valued as the product of human imagination.

Although contemporary scholarship on “imaginary geographies”, “imaginative geographies”, and “geographical imaginaries” is far from being restricted to literary geography (very often literature is not at all the focus), recent studies in literary geography renew the ways to approach it, or the reasons to resort to it. The examples showcased here will serve to highlight the various ways of articulating two or three of the approaches to literary geography described earlier. They will also illustrate that these three concepts, as similar as they may seem, do not refer to the same conception of imagination (as a faculty), nor do they distribute agency quite the same way (the author, the context, the text and/or the readers).

Imaginary geographies

Let me take as a point of departure the inspiring Geography of the night by Luc Bureau (1997). As a geographer trained in the humanistic geography spirit, he digs up myths and a wide range of literary works (from Greek and Roman literature, to Rétif de la Bretonne, via Rabelais, Shakespeare and Goethe, to name but a few) in order to explore how humanity has imagined and, so to speak, invented the night. In this search, Bureau is resorting to a universal and idealistic conception of the human spirit and, consequently, to a conq...