Introduction: Movement, Space, and Power in the Creative Act
Christian Beck2021, Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83477-7_1visibility
…
description
20 pages
link
1 file
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
The effects of postcolonialism, technology, and neoliberalism have highlighted the importance of spatial analysis, particularly in literary and cultural studies. This so-called spatial turn has brought significant attention to the ways in which spaces and places construct identities, behaviors, expectations, communication, and politics. Attention to geographical, cultural, and sociological spaces in literature introduces readers to the realities of many identities that are overlooked, underrepresented, or oppressed. Similarly, spatial analysis has also been linked to issues surrounding movement and mobility, as well as studies of resistance to dominant and oppressive power. However, more can be said about literature's role in illuminating new and diverse spaces, mobility studies, and a politics of resistance. Specifically, literature can be an avenue toward political and social action through its spatial awareness, production, and potentiality. While offering interpretations of literature, this collection seeks to show how literary spaces contribute to understanding, changing, or challenging notions of mobility and physical spaces of our lived world. Literature has
Related papers
Contested Spaces in Contemporary North American Novels
This volume investigates the ways in which Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and Carolyn See’s There Will Never Be Another You engage with the physical, ideological, and socially constructed “real-and-imagined” spaces of colonialism, justice, diaspora, and risk. Building on a range of theoretical approaches to the production of space, this study argues for the significance of literature as a cartographic practice charting the intricacies of the socio-spatiality of human life. Through rigorous readings, this book examines each novel as a critical map that both represents and explores contested spaces and alternative spatial negotiations. These spatially oriented literary analyses contribute to recent conceptualizations of space as socially and relationally produced, open, dynamic, and contested, and enrich the existing scholarship on the novels discussed here.
Space, Place, and Narrative: A Short Introduction
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik , 2016
Enacting Literary Geographies: Urban Narratives from Space Representation to Spatial Practices
2016
This work aims to address the emerging field of geohumanities, with particular attention to the approaches and methodologies developed in the field of literary geography. The six chapters focus on different urban contexts (North-eastern Italy's polinucleated city, international metropolises such as New York and Berlin, the Po Delta region) and disparate literary works and genres (novels, short stories collections, graphic novels and comic books) to analyse the representation and experience of contemporary urban life from a mobile geocritical perspective. Particular attention is paid to the narrative representation of urban practices, as well as to the exploration of interdisciplinary research methods informed by both urban/cultural geography and literary theory and criticism.
MOVING LITERARY GEOGRAPHIES. Narrative forms and practices of mobilities - A one-day Interdisciplinary Colloquium
2019
The purpose of this colloquium is to think about the ongoing reciprocal exchange between the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ and literary geographies. In particular, the event aims at interrogating the diverse ways in which the theories and methodologies triggered by the ‘mobility paradigm’ interact with literary geographies, including both texts and narrative practices. In our perspective, the focus on ‘mobilities’ suggests a move beyond the mere analysis of literary texts as representations, to read narratives as practices that encourage an unceasing critical movement; an open-ended engagement with the human and non-human worlds; an ongoing exploration of new mobile methodologies and forms of narrations (fictional/non-fictional, verbo-visual, cartographic). We foresee this as an opportunity to establish a network of scholars working across the disciplines, in the fields of literary geography and mobility. With ‘narrative forms and practices’ as a shared starting point, contributions will be related (but not limited) to: • State of the art of literary mobilities • Narrative creative methods (writing, storytelling etc.) • Narration of non-human mobilities • Fictional and non-fictional mobilities • Mobile maps and mappings • Mobile practices as generative of motion, routes, encounters and place • Im-mobilities/blockages, failures and disruptions • Collective and individual mobilities • Embodied mobility, privileged and excluded bodies • Virtual mobilities • The temporalities and rhythms of mobility • Mobilization of affect and atmospheres • Infrastructures, systems, assemblages • Unsettling concepts of migration, diaspora, postcolonialism, non-Western experiences of mobility • Interrogating distance and scale (global, planetary, home, bodies) • Moving through elements (water, air, earth, etc.) • Circuits of authorship and readership • Mobilities in comics and verbo-visual modes of expression
Spaces of longing and belonging: territoriality, ideology and creative identity in literature and film
Social & Cultural Geography, 2020
Spatiality and Symbolic Expression: On the Links between Place and Culture edited by Bill Richardson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) in Transnational Literature 9:1, 2016.
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).
Mapping the Imagination: Literary Geography
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
“Rethinking Space: An Outsider’s View of the Spatial Turn”
Geographical concerns with space and place have escaped the confines of the discipline of geography. Many humanities scholars now invoke such conceptions as a means to integrate diverse sources of information and to understand how broad social processes play out unevenly in different locations. The social production of spatiality thus offers a rich opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues between different schools of critical theory. Following a brief assessment of the spatial turn in history, history of science, and political philosophy, this paper explores its implications for literary and cultural studies. It invokes a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale. Space in this example appears as both matter and meaning, i.e., as simultaneously tangible and intangible, as a set of social circumstances and physical landscapes and as a constellation of discourses that simultaneously reflected, constituted, and at times undermined, the hegemonic social order. The intent is to demonstrate how multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship can be facilitated by paying attention to the unique of circumstances that define places within given historical moments. As seen in this example from literary colonial studies, other disciplines, therefore, can both draw from and contribute to poststructuralist interpretations of space as a negotiated set of situated practices.
The Role of Place in Literature
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.
Related topics
Related papers
Thinking (about Literary) Spaces: Ideas from the Cambridge Literary Geographies Conference
Literary Geographies journal was first published in 2015 with a commitment to encouraging ‘cross-fertilisations at the juncture where geography and literature meet’ (Hones et al. 2015: 1). This commitment is nowhere more apparent than in the number of special issues in recent years which have grown out of conference panels. After all, conferences are spaces where, unleashed temporarily from the disciplinary shackles which constrain our day-to-day working lives, cross-fertilisations can be seeded and can grow. This special collection of Thinking Space pieces is no different. The short but compelling pieces collected here are the product of a conference on literary geographies held in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in March 2017. This international gathering of geographers, literary scholars, literary cartographers and literary geographers was greatly encouraged by the editors of this journal to further the intellectual interactions between scholars working in this discipline – and to better help its advancement. In this introduction to the eleven Thinking Space pieces collected here I provide a context for the ideas they put forward and they debates they illuminate.
Reenvisioning space, mobilities and public engagement with young adult literature
English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 2020
In an era when engagement in public spaces and places is increasingly regulated and constrained, we argue for the use of literary analytic tools to enable younger generations to critically examine and reenvision everyday spatialities (Rogers, 2016; Rogers et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to consider how spatial analyses of contemporary young adult literature enrich interrogations of the spaces and places youth must navigate, and the consequences of participation for different bodies across those spheres. Design/methodology/approach-In a graduate seminar of teachers and writers, we examined literary texts through a combined framework of feminist cultural geography, mobilities and critical mobilities studies. In this paper, we interweave our own spatial analyses of two selected works of young adult fiction with the reflections of our graduate student participants to explore our spatial framework and its potential to enhance critical approaches to literature instruction. Findings-We argue that spatial literary analysis may equip teachers and students with tools to critically examine the spaces and places of everyday life and creatively reenvision what it means to be an engaged citizen in uncertain and troubling times. While we have engaged in this work for several years, we found that in light of the global pandemic, coupled with the recent antiracist demonstrations, a spatial approach to literary study emerges as a potentially even more relevant and powerful component of literature instruction. In March of 2020, we were preparing to facilitate a series of activities in a graduate seminar with a small group of practicing teachers and writers on how to analyze themes of space, place and mobilities in contemporary young adult (YA) fiction.
The Spatial Turn in Literary and Cultural Studies: Space, Place, and the Urban Imagination of Los Angeles
Key Concepts and New Topics in English and American Studies. Eds. Ansgar Nünning and Elizabeth Kovach. Trier: WVT, 2014. 55-76.
The Work and the World: Mobilities and Literary Space
This special section started its life as papers delivered at the American Association of Geographers meeting in 2015, in two panels which broadly considered the relationships between 'the work and the world'. Those panels explored the various ways in which literatures overspill their textual boundaries and interact with the world. The papers that were delivered together suggested that the space of 'the work', or literature, or art, is not necessarily distanced from the spaces of the world. From studies of mobility as a theme in literary representations, to new ways of mapping, and histories of travel and writing, these papers each argue that literary works are necessarily bound up in extra-textual space, and these extra-textual spaces are constituent parts of literature. Joining these papers is a mutual recognition that being mobile is as important as being in place for people's encounters with fiction. The interactions of mobile people with texts are used by each author as a way to think through the various expressions and consequences of the embodied and experiential act of encountering literature. In this special issue, we consider how the dynamic relationships between reader and text, person and world, can reverberate on literary creation and recreation. We demonstrate a variety of ways in which the space of literature and literature's relationship to the extra-textual world are being theorised within the broad church of literary geography. .
A Review of Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film and Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture: Static Heroes, Social Movements and Empowerment by Ana Ma Manzanas and Jesús Benito. European Journal of American Studies, 2016-1.
Social Movements and Empowerment analyze the trajectories of the spatial turn taking place from mid-20 th century onwards which has resulted in the appearance of new ways of assessing spatiality as well as new definitions of spatial concepts. Even though the two volumes are not a continuation per se, both books are co-authored by Ana M a Manzanas and Jesús Benito and the more recent Occupying Space complements and completes the issues discussed in Cities, Borders, and Spaces, which suggests continuity between the publications and encourages to read them as complementary. In Cities, Borders, and Spaces Manzanas and Benito argue that the " alleged new spatial turn of American exceptionalism has always been there " (2) but due to the redefinitions of spatial concepts allowed by post-prefixed theories, new spatial definitions do away with dichotomous oppositions and thus lend themselves to " plurality and openness " (6) as well as reflect the shift from stasis to mobility, activity, and heterogeneity. Consequently, the authors account for the complexity of the discipline, evoking numerous scholars who have contributed to different definitions of spatiality – including, among others,
Review of Spaces of Longing and Belonging: Territoriality, Ideology and Creative Identity in Literature and Film (ed. by Brigitte Le Juez and Bill Richardson)
Metacritic Journal of Comparative Studies and Theory, 2020
Spaces of Longing and Belonging is a comprehensive look at how human geographies can reproduce injustice or can be reorganised through cross-boundary coalition building. This rather perplexingly hybrid volume offers readers multiple points of entry into spatial thinking, promoting a constructive indiscipline. Geocriticism is proven to be more than flexible: it is plastic, unpredictable in its creative response to conflicts between the disposable and the preserved in space and culture, demonstrating the porosity of a rolling stone that can double as a stepping stone in one’s interdisciplinary research or even as a touchstone for other fields.
Literatureâs Sensuous Geographies
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.
Space, Place, and Power: The Spatial Turn in Literacy Research
Hall/International, 2013
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture
2021
This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research. The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds-ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds-i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms-and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.