Spatial Literary Studies

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination

Robert T. Tally Jr., Robert T. Tally Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000208047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination offers a wide range of essays that reframe or transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. These essays reflect upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality. Working within or alongside related approaches, such as geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities, these essays examine the relationship between literary spatiality and different genres or media, such as film or television. The contributors to Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making new textual geographies and literary cartographies possible.

Part I
Geocritical Theory and Practice

1Geocriticism at the Crossroads

An Overview

Mariya Shymchyshyn

In this essay I will outline some of the methodological and theoretical developments in late twentieth-century criticism that led to the spatial turn in the humanities. In particular, I will concentrate my attention on the concepts of space in the works of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, and I will pursue how they influenced literary theory, causing the emergence of “geocriticism” (e.g., in the work of Robert Tally, Bertrand Westphal, Eric Prieto) or, using another term, “literary geography” (e.g., in Franco Moretti). I will argue that the postmodern condition generated an alertness to space rather than time in different fields of scholarship, as historicism has undergone decline under postmodernism. My conclusion is that incorporating geographical thought into a variety of domains of research offers a better understanding of human experience, social relations, and cultural production. Even though the concept of space, as well as a geographical framework in general, have been revised and injected into recent theoretical inquiries, they have not been fully applied to literary criticism. We can witness the beginning of the process of formation of a coherent spatial paradigm within literary theory.

Over the last few decades the spatial turn has become one of the main focuses in literary theory and cultural studies, enabling (re)conceptualizations of ways of thinking about space and place. The discourse of postmodernism disclosed a break from languages that emphasized history, and concentrated its attention on real and fictional milieu. Neil Smith, in his Foreword to Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution, observes that “whereas space came alive in early-twentieth-century art, physics, and mathematics, in social theory and philosophy it was a quite different story. Space there was more often synonymous with rigidity, immobility, stasis; space itself had become a blind field.”¹ Since the 1960s, space has begun to reassert itself in critical theory, not only as a subject of symbolic readings or as an empty or neutral container of Euclidian geometry, but as a fluid, heterogenic, and composite world, as a palimpsest (Gerard Genette), as a hyperspace that produces derivative spaces, as a referent for an experience of the real, as a product of speech, and as a construct of social forces and power discourses. As Russell West-Pavlov put it, “Far from being a neutral void in which objects are placed and events happen, space/ing becomes a medium with its own consistency and, above all, its own productive agency.”² In his now famous 1967 speech “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault explained that

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciations of the world… . The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtapositions, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.³

Space and geography as major theoretical orientations bring new perspectives and open new horizons in the humanities.

The spatial turn in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, and literary theory correlated with the redefinition of cultural geography’s agenda. During 1980s and 1990s new cultural geographers brought the topics of sensibility and political interests to their studies. Linda McDowell observes: “what is published and taught under the rubric of ‘cultural geography’ changes in response to the political and economic climate of the times and the structures of disciplinary power.”⁴ The epistemological turn of the 1990s stressed understanding culture through space and as space. Culture is not perceived only as tradition handed down from generation to generation, a point that connects it with time and history, but as “a realm, medium, level, or zone.” Space is relevant to the production of cultural phenomena and defines the ways they are produced. As Barney Warf and Santa Arians write in their introduction to The Spatial Turn: “Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is crucial to knowing how and why they happen.”⁵ The new versions of culture that include everything or anything gave way to the intellectual traffic between philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, literary theories, and geography.

The exchange of ideas between scholars of geography and representatives of others sciences gave way to broad, non-stereotyped interpretations of space. For example, geographers like Derek Gregory, Doreen Massey, Steve Pile, and Edward Soja adapted theoretical ideas developed by Lefebvre, de Certeau, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari. Productive connections between geography and literary postmodernism have been made by these spatial theorists. The postmodernist suspicion of total explanations, rejection of monopolies of truth, and accent on difference, heterogeneity, and particularity contribute significantly to postmodern cultural geography. At the same time, literary scholars Westphal, Tally, and Moretti drew upon the work of these new cultural geographers in their own criticism and theory. Thus, for instance, Moretti states that “geography is not an inert container, is not a box, where cultural history ‘happens’, but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth.”⁶ The geographical paradigm becomes more and more a constitutive part of literary scholarship. Although sporadic attention to space or, it is better to say, place, has always been present in philosophical and fictional writings, the emergence of geocriticism in the early 1990s re-accentuated literary discussions.

The history of perception of space and place in different historical periods and different cultures shows fundamental changes in the ways people have imagined the world. In the Renaissance or early modern period several crucial shifts took place and had lasting consequences. Among them was the development of linear perspective, “which not only enabled more ‘accurate’ pictorial representations in the visual arts but also occasioned a wholesale re-imagining of space and of human spatial relations. This is a crucial moment in the history of spaces.”⁷ According to the American scholar Leonard Goldstein, the emergence of linear perspective between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries located space in three key aspects: (1) space is continuous, isotropic, and homogeneous; (2) space is quantifiable; (3) space is perceived from the point of view of a single, central observer. The shift from the two-dimensional artistic expression of the middle ages and the geometric three-dimensional drawings of the Italian Renaissance to the linear perspective of pictorial art of early capitalism can be explained by the emergence of new forms of private property and commodity production. As Tally observes, “Space could now be measured, divided, quantified, bought and sold, and above all controlled by a particular individual who, in theory, could be the sovereign ruler of all he surveyed.”⁸ Linear perspective, created in the modern period by Filippo Brunelleschi, reflected the new ways of seeing and enabled the development of a new image of the individual, who became the locus and source of meaning. Tally summarizes:

But the new point of view, which includes linear perspective and mechanism as its method of investigation, is superior [to the earlier iconographic mode] since it gives people a greater control over the environment, both physical and social, than previous interpretations of the world.⁹

In the philosophical discourse from Heraclitus to Hegel and Marx, the illusion of a transparent, pure, and neutral space permeated Western culture. The dynamics of the understanding of space started with it being created by God (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) or the Absolute (Schelling, Fichte, Hegel) and later, according to Lefebvre, it “appeared as a mere degradation of ‘being’ as it unfolded in a temporal continuum.”¹⁰ The geometric format of Euclidean space was interpreted by philosophical thought as absolute and from this it follows that space was used as a space of reference. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many ideas about space were developed. Thus, Descartes believed that space cannot be separated from bodies as bodies are part of space. Newton viewed space as an absolute, independent, infinite, three-dimensional container into which God placed the material universe. Leibniz developed the notion of space as the relation between bodies similar to distance as a relation between two points. Spinoza held the idea that space is God. Kant argued that the world is a subjective mental construction because it is perceived through human reason.

Space is not something objective and real, nor is it a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; it is, rather, subjective and ideal; it issues from the nature of mind in accordance with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for co-ordinating everything sensed externally.¹¹

The philosophers, in their capacity of epistemologists, envisaged spaces for the classification of knowledge.

In the nineteenth century, space was mostly understood as the location for great historical events. Therefore, temporality and history assumed a primary importance whereas space was viewed as static and empty. The view of space as a “container of things” diminished the importance of spatiality. The vista of a philosopher or a writer was directed to the things situated in space or to the individual consciousness perceiving them. The notion of historical progression, correlative with industrial and scientific revolutions, gave priority to the concept of time. Time was linearized while space was marginalized and conceived as given and static.

The radical metamorphoses caused by modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth transformed the idea of space. Feelings of disorientation and disintegration started to characterize the individual consciousness. A break of the linear narrative in fiction and the linear perspective in a pictorial art correlated with a fragmented perception of space. Although issues of temporality were privileged in the critical works about modernism, it does not mean that spatiality did not matter for modernist aesthetics. In his novel The Soul of London (1905), Ford Maddox Ford wrote that “we live in spacious times.” Neglecting space in favor of time is a practice that David Harvey explains in the following way: “Modernity is about the experience of progress through modernization, writings on that theme have tended to emphasize temporality, the process of becoming, rather than being in space and place.”¹² In literary studies, objective space was substituted for the subjective image of space. Therefore, even today, the theoretical problem is to uncover the mediations between them. It is necessarily to separate “a false consciousness of abstract space and an objective falseness of space itself,” as Lefebvre has put it.¹³ But despite this, spatial metaphors such as fragmentation, location, center, margin, movement, belonging, and (im)migration became dominant in modernist discourse. That is why scholars today start to think about the spatiality of modernism, for example, in Andrew Thacker’s excellent study of the subject.¹⁴

During the modernist period the new concept of space emerged in pictorial art. The experimental activity of av...