America/Deserta: Postmodernism and the Poetics of Space
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Catrin Gersdorf
Abstract
In the following essay, I read Peter Reyner Banham's Scenes in America Deserta (1982) as a text that exemplifies the significance of the new cultural geography for understanding the critical project of a transatlantic (post)modernity. Banham's text responds to (at least) two intellectual traditions: the discourse on the cultural poetics of space, associated with the work of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard; and the discourse of modern literary Orientalism, a phenomenon first analyzed by Edward Said. A close reading of Banham's non-fictional text reveals that postmodern conceptualizations of space depend, to a large degree, on literary strategies such as metaphorization, intertextual reference, and narration. This allows Banham to present the American desert as a key figure of postmodernity, one that transfers its aesthetic power to such politically and ethically relevant concepts as openness.
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Literature and the New Cultural Geography
- America/Deserta: Postmodernism and the Poetics of Space
- Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space: Towards a Postcolonial Analysis of Material Spatial Practices
- Literature, Travel and Geography: French Orientations
- Writing English Landscape History
- Placing Stories, Performing Places: Spatiality in Joyce and Austen
- Der Rhein: Poetik des Stroms zwischen Elementarisierung und Domestikation
- The Poetics of Geography in English-Canadian Literature
- Fated Landscape: Choropoetic Practice in Don DeLillo's Underworld
- The Traps: Bukowski as Interpreter of Cornered Lives
- Alexander Onysko, Anglicisms in German: Borrowing, Lexical Productivity, and Written Codeswitching
- Sabine Fiedler, English Phraseology: A Coursebook
- A History of the English Language, ed. Richard Hogg & David Denison; The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone
- The Celtic Englishes IV: The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram
- Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio
- Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553
- Sources of the Boece, ed. Tim William Machan with the assistance of A. J. Minnis
- The ‘Exhortation’ from Disce Mori. Edited from Oxford, Jesus College, MS 39, ed. E. A. Jones
- Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak
- Eingegangene Schriften
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Literature and the New Cultural Geography
- America/Deserta: Postmodernism and the Poetics of Space
- Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space: Towards a Postcolonial Analysis of Material Spatial Practices
- Literature, Travel and Geography: French Orientations
- Writing English Landscape History
- Placing Stories, Performing Places: Spatiality in Joyce and Austen
- Der Rhein: Poetik des Stroms zwischen Elementarisierung und Domestikation
- The Poetics of Geography in English-Canadian Literature
- Fated Landscape: Choropoetic Practice in Don DeLillo's Underworld
- The Traps: Bukowski as Interpreter of Cornered Lives
- Alexander Onysko, Anglicisms in German: Borrowing, Lexical Productivity, and Written Codeswitching
- Sabine Fiedler, English Phraseology: A Coursebook
- A History of the English Language, ed. Richard Hogg & David Denison; The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone
- The Celtic Englishes IV: The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram
- Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio
- Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553
- Sources of the Boece, ed. Tim William Machan with the assistance of A. J. Minnis
- The ‘Exhortation’ from Disce Mori. Edited from Oxford, Jesus College, MS 39, ed. E. A. Jones
- Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak
- Eingegangene Schriften
