Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces
Bertrand Westphal
Language: English
Pages: 207
ISBN: B01K0RVABA
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Although time traditionally dominated the perspectives of the humanities and social sciences, space has reasserted itself in the contexts of postmodernity, postcolonialism, and globalization. Today, a number of emerging critical discourses connect geography, architecture, and environmental studies, among others to literature, film, and the mimetic arts. Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism explores these diverse fields, examines various theories of space and place, and proposes a new critical practice suitable for understanding our spatial condition today. Drawing on a wide array of theoretical and literary resources from around the globe and from antiquity to the present, Westphal argues for a geocritical approach to literary and cultural studies. This volume is an indispensible touchstone for those interested in the interactions between literature and space.
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further cross-sectional analyses.” He adds that the “series of arbitrary points of intersection between diachrony and synchrony” allow the literary historian to “articulate the processlike character of ‘literary evolution’ in its formative moments of history as well as the caesurae between periods.”59 Like the text, the history of a given space is not entirely diachronic; its history may also be revealed in synchronic slices. The seventh thesis states that the “social function of literature
it appears that the study of space-time in literature, as in other fields of humanities and social sciences, is polycentric . . . or not. The second observation relates to the interdisciplinary character of theoretical exploration. The few examples listed here are drawn from fields as diverse as literature, history, and above all geography. Other related disciplines include architecture, urban studies, philosophy, anthropology, and more. It is inconceivable to consider systems of spatial or
relates a significant anecdote: in 499, the Ionian Aristagoras had visited Cleomenes of Sparta to convince him to organize a campaign against the Persians; in doing this, he unfolded a map, to be used to support his speech. But Aristagoras failed: seeing the space laid out visually, Cleomenes realized that it would take three months to reach Persia by sea, so it seemed out of reach.66 The Middle Ages maintained some of the spirit of the ancient Greeks, but by placing all representation of the
conventional modes of thought and taken-for-granted epistemologies. It is disorderly, unruly, constantly evolving, unfixed, never presentable in permanent pal-westphal-02.indd 71 3/7/11 3:36 PM 72 ● Geocriticism constructions.”108 The third space, which constitutes the core space of Soja’s trialectics, presents a strong analogy with the territory in emergence as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Third space is the spatial formulation of transgressivity, which is itself a movement,
boundaries between reality and fiction? With Pavel’s Fictional Worlds, we can definitively break with structuralism and its autotelic logic. Similarly, we may have broken from what McHale describes as a “nostalgia for unproblematic mimesis.”53 It is therefore not surprising that the first chapter of Pavel’s book has a title like a manifesto: “Beyond Structuralism.” After denouncing the “textolatry” of Derrida and other architects of the break with the hors-texte, Pavel writes, “A debate began to
