Topologies of becoming: deferred presences in writing

Place is one of the most important concepts in human geography. In recent years, it has become necessary to re-evaluate the idea of place in order to use it in changing social, cultural and political situations. Different methodologies have contributed to this rethinking of place. Poststructuralist thinking is one of these approaches, as it has emphasised textuality and writing. This has promoted seeing places not as stable and bound things, but rather as becoming or ongoing events. This research approaches place as a discursive question, and explores the poststructuralist and postmodern ideas of place in relation to other conceptions. The research questions are the following: 1) What kinds of frames for writing place have there been? 2) How can place be thought of as becoming, process or event, and how are such conceptions reflected in the methods and conditions of writing places? 3) What kinds of textual strategies are used while writing places, and what do these tell about politics in writing? The textuality of place is studied from methodological and conceptual points of view. The material consists of geographical and philosophical texts, through which the limits of writing place have been explored. In addition, there are literal, visual, and architectural texts of urban space, which illustrate different textual strategies in the practices of writing. Close reading of these texts allows place to be approached discursively. The question of method is also reflected throughout the study, as the possibilities for “methods of becoming” in addition to the “methods of being” are thought through. Place has usually been defined in terms of location, human experience, exclusion, or social construction. In poststructuralist thinking, there have been efforts to deconstruct the central role of the subject, the logic of exclusion, and thinking in terms of being. The challenge has been how to think spatially without locating, or without reducing differences into categories, oppositions and binaries. Signification, temporisation, spacing and displacement are examples of themes that have promoted those efforts and problematised the assumed limits of writing places. Promoting the idea of becoming place has not demanded radical changes in textual strategies. The idea of movement has been delivered into the texts for instance by multimodality, undecidability, context-sensitivity, or by thinking beyond the divisions of subject/object or world/text. The effort in the last option lies in writing with places instead of writing about them. This research gives conceptual and methodological tools for thinking place. These can be applied particularly in the fields of cultural geography, urban studies and cultural studies. The reformulation of the question of place in this research may be useful especially in studies in which movements, events and changes of places are of interest, or in which the limits of writing places are studied critically.

2012

then.proceeds. to.demonstrate.how.students.progressively.develop.an. understanding.of.place..The.intent.here.is.to.build.on.these. ideas.through.discussion.of.a.wide.range.of.thinking.about. place.with.most.examples.chosen.from.Australia.and.the. Asia-Pacific.region. Place.is.a.rich.geographical.concept.that.fires.the. geographical.imagination..Place.is.teased.out.here.by:. examining.theory,.or,.'grand.narratives' ,.as.well.as.stories. that.people.tell.about.place;.the.experience.of.place.which. emphasises.the.connection.between.'being.in.the.world' 1. and.the.sense.of.place.associated.with.living.in.specific.places. (Agnew,.Livingstone.&.Rogers,.1996.370);.and.place.as.a.locus. of.identity.because.people.invest.their.surroundings.with. meaning.and.can.develop.a.sense.of.place.(367). Places and Place Firstly,.it.is.necessary.to.differentiate.between.places.and. place..Places.occupy.the.high.ground.in.many.primary.school. geographies.and.have.taken.up.much.desk.space.in.high. school.geographies.. Glacken.spoke.evocatively.about.places,.'In.1937.I.spent. eleven.months.travelling.in.many.parts.of.the.world..The. yellow.dust.clouds.high.over.Peking,.the.dredged.pond.mud. along.the.Yangtze,.the.monkeys.swinging.from.tree.to.tree. at.Angkor.Vat,.a.primitive.water-lifting.apparatus.near.Cairo,. the.Mediterranean.promenade,.the.goat.curd.and.the.carob. of.Cyprus,.the.site.of.Athens.and.the.dryness.of.Greece,.the. shrubs,.the.coves,.the.hamlets,.and.the.deforestation.of. the.Eastern.Mediterranean,.the.shepherds.of.the.Caucuses,. the.swinging.swords.of.Central.Asians.in.the.markets.of. Ordzhonikidze,.the.quiet.farms.of.Swedish.Skane.-.these.and. many.other.observations.made.me.realise.as.part.of.my.being. the.commonplace.truth.that.there.is.a.great.diversity.both.of. human.cultures.and.of.the.physical.environments.in.which. they.live' .(Glacken,.1967)..

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.

Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2018

This paper examines the how of literary wheres. As makers of literary works, creative writers are tasked with evoking place on the page. While the nexus of place and literature is increasingly recognised as fertile scholarly ground, the specifics of how writers actually “make” literary places remain opaque and under-researched. I seek to address this gap by exploring how literary place is constituted through creative practice. Focusing on the work of Australian writer Tony Birch, I document a range of generative tools creative writers may use to produce what I call “literary sense of place”. Drawing on interview-based case studies and key concepts from human geography, I analyse how these practitioners harness various “off-page” modes of enquiry to evoke place compellingly in textual form. While my main focus is creative practice, I also examine the resultant literary texts to help illuminate how process manifests in content. By profiling a range of “place-oriented experiential techniques (POETs)” – including site visits, memory, direct encounters, sensory attentiveness, “vicarious emplacement”, socio-cultural understandings, and happenstance – I present a fine-grained account of literary place-making from a practitioners’ perspective. I conclude that producing literary place is a generative, cumulative and associative process, in which writers mobilise a rich array of lived sensations, emotions, memories, understandings and actions. In foregrounding these “backstage” modes of creative labour, this paper helps clarify how writers deploy both personal and shared experiences to render literary place in resonant ways.

A growing number of studies acknowledge the interpretative potential of spatial models for the understanding of diverse cultural phenomena. Published as part of Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, a book series edited by Robert T. Tally Jr., the volume reflects the increasing global interest in spatiality and the immense expanse of spatial approach within the humanities. According to its editor, Bill Richardson, the volume examines 'how spatial realities inform symbolic expression and how a variety of forms of symbolic expression and cultural production rely on those spatial realities to achieve their ends' (2). The essays seek to extend recent developments in the field of spatio-cultural studies and apply new conceptual approaches to a variety of cultural forms. This theoretically dense collection works at 'the intersection of two conceptual " axes " , the abstract/concrete axis and the individual/collective axis' (3).

Themes in literary criticism move in and out of focus, influenced by wider cultural trends that sometimes derive from sciences like psychology, ecology, and physics; or through periodic drifts in sociopolitical arenas like Marxism and democracy, or gender-equality. The nation has been the dominant socio-cultural construction of the last few centuries, a verity which has significantly influenced both production and analysis of literature. The relatively recent advances in communicative technologyair travel, internet, cellular phones, GPS, and so onmodify conventional notions of place and time, peoples, and communities. These transformations command new cultural perspectives in the same way that they have resulted in new citizenship and migration laws, economic models, and educational pedagogies. 1 Moreover, postnational characteristics percolate through Hemingway's novels, yet critics often employ American categorizations to the man's life and texts, and this construct has long been a principal axis of investigation, in spite of his distancegeographic, cultural, and linguisticfrom the constraints of that label.

Lund University Dissertation, 2003

In this thesis the notion of place is studied by way of investigating the “non-place” which is excluded or opposed, whenever a place is defined. “Non-place” is used here as a meta-concept, covering various recurring types of opposition to “place,” and it therefore represents a profoundly incoherent spectrum of realities and concepts. Hence, a “non-place” may in this investigation appear as “leftover areas in urban planning,” as “passage,” as “site,” as “utopia,” and as “inauthentic architecture.” The study is made in relation to a set of authors and artists chosen for their influence on contemporary aesthetics of place, and for their explicitly stated dichotomies as regards architectural, geographical or social space. These dichotomies (and authors) have been studied in three parts. In Part I: Places of Preference a group of authors and artists are discussed as conveying a negative view of the modern place-forms where “placelessness” replaced a traditional and culturally dense place. In Part II: Other Places the discussion of polarised notions of place is continued, but now with authors who may be regarded as having a view of non-places as useful. Here, deviance from a normal condition is seen as a prominent theme. Finally, in Part III: The Site-Specific, the notion of place is discussed in relation to the recent historical changes of the concepts of site-specificity and regionalism in art and architecture. The overall aim of the thesis is to show that when place is viewed in terms of dichotomies there is a risk of losing the perspective where social interaction, cultural multiplicity and individual activity is regarded. By focusing instead on placial variants, where the dichotomies are discussed in relation to a set of modalities, places may be regarded in their sociospatial and cultural diversity. The “wants,” the “needs,” the “musts,” the “wills,” i.e., the subjective or actantial influence on a spatial negotiation or an architectural realisation is then put into the foreground. To sharpen the modal approach a concentration should be held not on mere modulation of form where a house, a square or a park is given a slightly new shape, but on the significant alteration of a given comprehension, or use, of a place. This means also that several operators, on different actualising and realising levels, have to be considered when a place or a site-specific work is maintained or changed. Here, such place-formative processes have been studied as the modalities that apear in for instance exploitation, privatisation, domination and identification.

2014

What makes a place a place? A question that has eluded thinkers, from Aristotle to some of the leading social scientists of our age. Intuitively it can be sensed that ‘place’ belongs to a different register or modality of existence than other geographic signifiers such as ‘space’ or ‘site’. The question I wish to pose in this chapter is how we can find ways to begin to re-conceputalize place in a manner that, with the words of Donna Haraway (2010), ‘stays with the trouble’ of the entangled ontological complexity of the phenomenon of place instead of forcing us to succumb to unwarranted reductions. A conceptualization that may be of help in highlighting just how the concept of place appears to transverse the ingrained but highly artificial subject/object-divide which is latent in much of Western thinking. Instead I hope to showcase some of the intellectual tooling that may be of help in tracing the intertwinement, or even mutual constitution, of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, as well as the ‘material’ and the ‘social’, which complex ontological phenomena such as places may help to open our eyes to. Borrowing words from Dovey, we can hopefully find some ways to explorehow to “move beyond a false choice between place as pre-given or as socially constructed” (Dovey, 2010:6).

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).

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