Unfolding Processes of Transversal 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.

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.

Literator, 1995

The main theoretical difficulty inherent in the teaching o f literature ", Paul deMan (1986:29) observed, "is the delimitation o f borderlines that circum scribe the literary field by setting it apart from other modes o f discourse ", Dissatisfied with numerous existing notions as regards literature which are oblivious to the fact that literature depends upon a writer, a book, and a reader, this essay explores spatial denominators in its attempt to define the literary domain. It is argued that while story-telling precedes and succeeds literature, the site o f the latter is one which emerged only in modernity and is about to be re-territorialized in the present. The republic o f letters or the realm where the text functions as possible world is being replaced by the quarry o f stories defining the world as text. Thus the modalities o f signifi cation have increased, yet the space o f literature has been transformed by technological means changing it into the archive, a place o f the past rather than a site o f present production.

International Review of Qualitative Research, 2024

In this paper, we seek to intervene in the proposition that there are recognisable or abstract-able modes of doing qualitative writing, and instead affirm that writing from a feminist scholarly perspective is often an embodied, domestic, haptic and serendipitous gesture. Occurring in in-between spaces and moments, in which personal and professional life frequently meld, with porous boundaries, our writing practices appear to talk back rhetorically to the notion of writing qualitatively. What are the qualities of qualitative writing? Within education (our field) quality can seem to masquerade as a measurable, generalizable thing, implying a ‘gold standard’ or that different writing practices or products can or should be compared or ranked. For us, writing is frequently encountered as serendipitous, messy and intricately entwined with daily life at numerous scales. This is not to suggest that writing magically takes shape, but rather it is un-abstract-able from daily routines, situations and energies at local and global scales. In the middle of these situations, writing happens when it takes precedence, at whatever cost that might be to bodies, relationships and domestic schedules. Working with a range of feminist philosophers, we draw the temporal, situated, mattering of writing into focus. This paper engages in non-linear story-telling about the processes of our collaborative writing of this paper. We are particularly inspired by Stewart’s (2007:75) approach to writing to convey moments of ordinary life, which she describes as “a circuit that is always tuned into some little something, somewhere. A mode of attending to the possible and the threatening”. We dwell upon the somethings and the somewheres as a means to draw out the temporal passing by of life in all its messiness, as a piece of writing comes together, tracing moments of shimmering intensity and mundane frustration and distraction throughout the work.

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2009

This paper describes a cross-disciplinary method of encountering place and place-specific art work. This involves two stages: a close sensory observation of the place's details followed by a remembering of this engagement through writing. I suggest that, as a method, it offers a way of negotiating the distinct roles of critic and practitioner by juxtaposing creative modes of writing alongside more traditional academic forms. By drawing on the work of five writers in particular, I will demonstrate how they influenced and inspired me to develop my own writing practice. They are anthropologist Clifford Geertz, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, novelist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, cultural critic and art writer Mieke Bal, and architectural designer, historian and theorist Jane Rendell. I will also provide a sample of my practice in the form of a written tour of the Princelet Street House Museum in London.

2013

When I aim to learn about a civil war or a revolution in a part of the world I know little about, my first impulse is to find a novel. Only afterwards do I compile a professional bibliography. In the language of this volume, I initially bypass the mode of worlding constituted by social science and by Western IR. Instead, I turn first to the transgressive worlding of fiction. How might this make sense even for a professional academic? Reading a novel and reading a professional article call for different dispositions. We are suspicious, alert and guarded when reading a scientific account. In contrast, while reading a literary narrative our "guard" is down. What raises our guard?

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2018

This paper might not describe spatial writing or qualitative inquiry. This paper might not express or represent writing in well-defined space by clearly identified scholars or authors. This paper might not write and presented images might not speak. Instead, possibilities in this paper might be stimulated through the acts of reading, writing, thinking, and doing. Writescapes, as lived and discussed in this paper, have potential to create and produce other writings, becoming thinkings, and conceptual experimenting in relation to qualitative inquiry even at the times of continuously changing political apparatuses. As such writescapes produce often in very unexpected ways through their relationality and connectedness and they bring together writers, texts, spaces, and processes. In this article, we interact with spatialized texts and relational processes in very intimate ways acknowledging our scholarly and socio-political contexts but at the same time working against normative scholarship and linear scholarly thinking and writing.

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.

This article aims to establish a connection between Daniela Cascella's writing sound and Maurice Blanchot's radical fiction. It will show how Cascella's interest in the relationship between sound and writing pulls her toward a similar abyssal space as the one Blanchot arrives at in his critical essays and own works of fiction. By firstly distinguishing her work, by emphasising its poetic power, from certain trends in sound studies, this essay will read Cascella alongside the writing of Blanchot. It will be shown how both Cascella and Blanchot's writing circles a vanishing point in which the inaugural moment of writing slowly dissipates. The significance of reading will then be explored as a prolongation of this dispossessing temporality of writing. Importantly, then, this article is not trying to say something about the ontological dimension of sound. The commonality drawn between these two authors will be positioned according to the strangeness of writing.