Geography, genre, and hemispheric regionalism

2021

Édouard Glissant’s notions Relation, Place (Lieu), “forced poetics”, “le drive”, and “detour” are discussed through close readings of Glissant’s representations of lived relational, material, physical and discursive geographies in the Caribbean, which are unfolded with references to Caribbean archival research. Using Denmark, a former colonial power in the Caribbean and whose educational policies are influenced by international trends and organisations as a case, the author draws on surveys, interviews, studies of Danish education in geography, and ministerial guidelines and regulations for teaching geography. Bojsen’s analysis confirms recent research from other scholars that suggest a growing predominant utilitarian and economy-focused conceptualization of geography in Denmark, where physical geography appears to be increasingly disconnected from social and cultural parameters. However, her reading deploys Glissant’s geography of “Relation”, which she considers a counter-geography...

Romanic Review

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2006

Last week I was at a meeting of Latin American scholars who were debating a joint project provisionally titled, ' Between Power and Knowledge. Towards a History of Intellectual Elites '. It soon became clear that all of the terms of the title including ' between ' were to be contested. Such radical revisionism also haunts Latin American literary studies as we attempt to rethink national and regional cultures in what is now regarded as a post-national moment, one in which there has been a rejection of linear historical narrative, a questioning of the very term ' Latin American ' as a self-explanatory framework and of literature as an evolving series of well defi ned genres and movements, evaluated according to not always very clear aesthetic criteria and with regard for linguistic virtuosity. The national and continental imaginaries, deployed in Neruda ' s Canto General , in Gabriela Mistral ' s Canto a Chile , in López Velarde ' s Suave Patria , and explored, re-evaluated and condemned in countless novels, are diluted or dissipated as Latin American writers now situate their narratives in Siberia, Germany, Africa, London, Paris or a myriad of other places or abandon the nation ' s capital for its margins and provinces. When I began teaching in the early sixties, it was quite common for people to ask what was ' my ' country, taking it for granted that one specialised in a national culture. José Donoso remarked on the fact that it was uncommon in 1960 to hear laymen speak of the contemporary Spanish American novel: 'there were Uruguayan, or Ecuadorian, Mexican or Venezuelan novels ' (Donoso, 1977: 10). Yet many writers, most prominently Borges, had already repudiated the idea of a purely national tradition. Cortázar (1969) boasted of the mental ubiquity afforded him because of living and writing in Paris, and Donoso (1977: 19) enthusiastically supported the ' disfi guring contamination of foreign languages and literatures '. But this did not mean that they did not situate their writing within the nation, although their view was often oblique. There was an abundance of terms-dependency, underdevelopment, Third World, periphery-to which thinking about the nation was yoked (Escobar, 1995), and there was anxiety over anachronism, over the time warp, over the need to attain parity, or, as Octavio Paz put it (e.g. Paz, 1967), to inhabit a time when Latin Americans would be in synchrony with the rest of the world, a synchrony which the novelists felt themselves to have attained. The boom was a coming of age, an entry into adulthood, and a refusal to be identifi ed with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the ' novela de la tierra ' .

2015

Globalisation Studies hinge upon one another, I am sensitive to their disciplinary interface, which might usefully be further explored. Such a study merits individual attention, however, and is beyond the scope of this dissertation. This dissertation focuses on what I consider to be the imperative for Literary Studies to address globalisation as a new narrative optics. I align myself with Connell & Marsh and Gupta, who assert that, regardless of the scholarly hesitancy within Literary Studies to engage with globalisation, this particular phenomenon has, in fact, introduced an unprecedented condition that cannot be adequately described with reference to orthodox postcolonial analysis. There remains a largely unexamined dialectic between Literary and Globalisation Studies that begs scholarly attention. Indeed, the concept of globalisation does not merely, as Gupta argues, batter on Literary Studies 'from the outside'. If that were the case, then the call for Literary Studies to take up the mantle of globalisation "comes across as a rearguard manoeuvre to catch up with phenomena that have already taken place at some other more meaningful or important level" (Szeman, 2007). Rather, as we shall see, the poetics and politics of globalisation are engrained within contemporary literature, which, often explicitly, engages with, reshapes, and even rejects dominant globalisation narratives. Contemporary literature constitutes a prominent site of articulation for globalisation narratives, and a new vocabulary is needed within Literary Studies with which to address these narratives. I propose that the nexus between Literary and Globalisation Studies provides a fresh and timely perspective on how contemporary literature represents patterns of social organisation and modes of being-in-the-world that are shaped by global connectivity and, further, that such globalisation narratives not only reflect, but are also actively involved in a 16 experience of what Harvey terms 'time-space compression'. In other words, they bring geographically and culturally disparate parts of the world into ever-closer proximity. Mass and velocity are unique to the contemporary moment, as is the widespread awareness of global flows. With reference to prominent works on the impact of globalisation upon the contemporary order such as Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) and Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity (2000), George Ritzer contends that, whereas the world was previously described by reference to 'solid' territorial borders, it is now conceived in de-territorialised terms of liquid global 'flows' (Ritzer, 2010, pp. 1-28). The metaphor of liquidity has obtained canonical status in globalisation discourses. It invokes characteristics of transience and contagion as characteristics of "the present global age" (Ritzer, 2010, p. xiv). In this view, globalisation has effected a diminution of spatial, temporal, and social barriers which were in the past perceived as unambiguous, or "solid". With the invention of new travel and communications technologies, information, images, ideas, and capital are becoming ever more immaterial in the sense that they can be transferred through etherspace almost instantaneously from one place to another. However, as Anna Tsing observes, the human sense of scale has not, in fact, been annihilated by this compression of time and space (Tsing, 2000). Rather, globalisation has transformed existing "ideologies of scale", which are always defined by reference to historically and culturally specific "claims about locality, regionality, and globality; about stasis and circulation; and about networks and strategies of proliferation" (Tsing, 2000, p. 347). The barriers of the past have not collapsed, but mutated so as to accommodate a global order. Global 'flows' do not move unrestrictedly along smooth paths of relation, but are often surveyed and limited through what Ritzer terms "subtler structural barriers" (Ritzer, 2010, p. 23). Alongside the process of liquefaction, then, infrastructures are developed to manage and regulate these global flows. In a world where spatial and temporal borders seem to be dissolving, access rather than territory becomes the central determinant of sovereignty. The almost boundless freedom of movement often associated with globalisation is contingent upon access to networks of communication and travel which are largely reserved for, and controlled by, a global elite. The global order has generated new hierarchies and ruptures.

American Literary History, 2011

Some years ago, while we were driving to the Grand Canyon, my husband flipped on the car radio. Out of it came not the usual bluster of pop-rock and car-lot commercials, but a dulcet voice speaking a language neither of us understood or, for a moment, recognized. It was Diné, of course, more widely known as Navajo. Deep in the heart of the United States of America, we had crossed the border into another nation altogether: simultaneously inside, and outside, the map of "America." The American map, which lies so apparently flat and solid, is in fact yeasty with such heterogeneous spaces. This may seem counterintuitive: US Americans grow up thinking of "America" as an iconic shape with clear boundaries separating home from abroad, and indeed, my trusty national map stops crisply at those boundaries, pushing even our fellow Americas, Mexico and Canada, off the edges of the known world. According to this map, America expanded to its present shape like water poured onto a table, spreading smoothly outward, flooding all in its path until, suddenly, for reasons left unsaid, it simply stopped-as if geography were blind to history. But this cannot be true: at its onset, modern geography was defined by virtue of historical processes. In the words of Alexander von Humboldt, both landforms and languages could be understood only as a function of their development through time: "Their form is their history" (1.72). In Humboldt's vision of the Cosmos, human history itself was no less than geography , earth-writing, landforms and languages interacting in a reciprocal and unfolding dynamic with no traces of a beginning and no end in sight. This profound insight could have been the foundation of something new, a deeply interdisciplinary *Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature and in literature and science. She has published widely, including books on Thoreau, Emerson, and most recently, Alexander von Humboldt.

2015

Series description: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.

Primerjalna književnost, 2021

Some literatures, like Canadian literature, may be considered minor because Canada is not a major power. But in reality, Canadian literature and other literatures, large or small, are part of a cultural history that is not merely local or even national, but international. The territories of culture and literature in literal or metaphorical terms shift over time. Using a comparative method, this article examines texts—such as The Saga of Eric the Red and works by Columbus, Verrazzano, Jeannette C. Armstrong, Marie Annharte Baker and Carrie Best—to demonstrate the shifting boundaries of time and space and to explore the connections between cultures and literatures in Canada, Europe and the Atlantic and international worlds as part of a longstanding globalization. The article demonstrates that the hybridity resulting from cross-cultural contact and colonization typically blurs the distinction between center and periphery, revealing the historical fluidity of the political boundaries on...

Lucian Blaga Yearbook, 2020

German Quarterly, 2021

Literary Studies and Entanglements beyond the Nation i have always had an ambivalent relationship to the job description of scholars employed in "national" literature programs. on the one hand, i envy the expertise of these scholars, their deep and detailed knowledge of a circumscribed body of works and authors, often not only demarcated by linguistic and political-geographical boundaries, but also by historical incisions that have long defined the pedagogical training they offer: German literature 1918-1933; american literature 1837-1861; French literature 1643-1715. the level of expertise may even rise further as scholars focus on one specific author's life and work. on the other hand, i cannot help wondering what drove some scholars to rule out "the world" and opt for "the nation." Does being an expert in, say, thomas Mann or his Buddenbrooks not automatically lead one to alexander kielland's Garman & Worse, from lübeck and Germany to Stavanger and Norway? in Salman rushdie or his Midnight' s Children to Günter Grass and The Tin Drum, from Mumbai, india and england to Danzig, Germany and Poland? or in Felicitas hoppe-for example hoppe or some of her children's books-to hans Christian andersen's autofictional works or fairy tales, from Germany to Denmark? My own experiences with libraries may illustrate an important point here. in spite of the archive's heterogeneity and endlessness, there has always been a certain target-oriented ethos determining my behavior in research libraries. i am usually searching for something very specific. however, my behavior in public libraries is different. there i am more open to contingencies and spontaneous inspiration. When i was young, i remember how fascinated and absorbed i was in front of the shelves with translated literature from (almost) all over the world. today, i realize the importance of these shelves for "bibliomigrancy" and its constitutive role in the creation of a specific version of world literature (Mani, Recoding World literature). Seen from my current scholarly and institutional perspective, all those translations loosened the strict ties between literature and language that define or at least dominate national literature departments. they facilitated contacts. here, on these bookshelves, Margaret atwood was a neighbor to Miguel Ángel asturias. a little further away but still in the area, Chinua achebe and edward albee lived on the same street. Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Beckett were on the same shelf as aphra Behn, Gottfried Benn, and Victoria Benedictsson. Why would i not want to read all of them? Similar to what Domínguez, Saussy, and Villanueva claim about comparative literature, a bookshelf with translated fiction in a public library "endorses some of the intuitions we have as common readers," for example that reading has an element of "just for fun" (ix), but not least that it has a freedom to it, which is not restricted by any one geography and language. the expertise and sharp historical incisions that national literary specializations invoke run the risk of insulation. admittedly, the discipline of comparative literature has its own pitfalls. the comparative method may take the form of groundless analogies, or its worldly ambition may lead to dilettantism. But the principle of not ruling anything out, of letting the world in, is a risk worth taking. Franco Moretti has argued that whether it is studied by a nationalist or a comparatist, the literature is the same. the two methods, however, see something different: trees and waves. it is generally acknowledged that for comparative literature to emerge (around 1810), there first had to exist national literatures and, not least, a firm idea of what characterized each of those. if not, there would not have been anything to compare. But