Volume 126, Issue 2

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.

This article calls for a new orientation in postcolonial studies to the spatial material conditions of colonization, anti-colonialism and neo-colonialism In this article I contend that the focus upon problems of epistemology which gave postcolonial studies its intellectual strength, by displacing the older modes of attention to empirical history and political struggle, effectively pushed out of sight a range of material practices which had been described, albeit in the language of empiricism, by imperial history, and combated, often in predominantly pragmatic ways, by anti-colonial struggle. Postcolonial studies may need to recuperate the neglected history of material practices of space – the conquest of territory and its colonial exploitation – to which geographers have always paid detailed attention, from the perspective of an epistemologically informed and culturally inflected postcolonialism. Postcolonial studies would do well to retain the epistemological and representational insights to which it owes its extraordinary disciplinary impact over several decades, while refocusing upon the more elemental material – and thus spatial – issues which lie at its historical origins.

The interest of French geographers in literature developed mainly after 1970, just as in other Western countries. However, it owed its specific characteristics to the fact that it was influenced by a long French literary tradition in writing geography, and because of Julien Gracq/Louis Poirier, who was at the same time one of the best French novelists and a good geographer. Geographers first considered literature – and more especially novels – as a new source of documentary evidence in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. They were fascinated by the way narratives were used to convey the feelings of people experiencing geographic evidence, and to induce dramatic tension in landscape descriptions. During the last fifteen years, more attention has been given to the construction of geographic representations through texts or images – hence the growing interest in travel literature and guides.

This essay considers landscape history as a cultural practice emerging in post-war England. Attention is given to the cultural motivations and textual conventions of landscape historians such as Hoskins, Barley and Beresford. Issues addressed include the cultural politics of scales such as locality and county, the cultural value ascribed to vernacular building, and the discovery of the deserted medieval village as a cultural icon.

This paper examines the role of space in sustaining the action of Austen and Joyce's writings. Using these contrasting textual styles, it looks at the different geographies produced and the texts the different geographies enable. It examines the role of location and connotations from places in sustaining and enlivening novels. But more than this it looks at how the emplotment of novels build differing spatialities that encode senses of the world. In Austen we find a closed, coherent and orderly world whose boundaries and exclusions make possible the polite society within. In Joyce's Ulysses , we instead find the overlaying and intermingling of differing spatial scales and forms. The result is a tension between an ordered, systematic spatiality and a chaotic form when its recapitulative structure exceeds its own boundaries. In both we find a fictive landscape which helps make the novels work by reframing and re-imagining the world. In this sense they do not take place in space but produce their own characteristic spaces.

In the early 19th century, German poets start to conceive of the Rhine river in a significant new way. The water appears as a poetic resource and as a dynamic force of industrial production at the same time. In Hölderlin and Brentano, the Rhine is attributed a twofold quality, whereas the water seems to evoke individuality ( kairos ) and connectivity (cycle). In poetic terms, the river's domestication by means of hydro-engineering leads to an even more radical concept of elementary savageness, concluding in creations of a so-called new mythology like the famous ‘Loreley’.

This paper found its inception in what Barbara Godard (2000) has termed “the persistence of a geografictional imperative in Canadian fiction”, thereby suggesting that geography possesses an illocutionary force that artists relentlessly seek to capture and translate. As a result, this paper's approach rests upon the premise that references to geographical formations and processes (e. g. ‘peneplain’, ‘fault line’, ‘divide’, ‘moraine’, ‘metamorphism’, ‘erosion’, ‘foldings’ or ‘sedimentation’) acquire an additional value in fiction that exceeds their descriptive requirements. Reversing the perspective traditionally adopted in literary geography makes it possible to probe the symbolic process upon which verisimilitude relies and determine to what extent physical geography informs a distinct response to space in contemporary Canadian literature. This reorientation opens onto a series of interrogations: what blanks in conventional landscape writing may geography fill and how? Where does the efficiency of geography lie beyond its scientific accuracy or descriptive relevance? Pondering the role of geography in a work of art therefore amounts to considering what makes geography work as art – is there such a thing as a poetics of geography?

Don DeLillo's millennial novel, Underworld , is not just about social, political or global systems as such, but equally about the processes of spatial organisation through which they are gathered. Indeed, Underworld uses an array of spatial practices to lend it an overall structure that is geographical as well as temporal and historical. This is not to reduce the significance of its fixed historical scenes or the order in which they occur, but to suggest that for contingent and writerly texts like Underworld , a reading via spatial parameters can prove ultimately more rewarding. Questioning Kavadlo's claim that “[t]he novel, however, seems less concerned with where we are than how we got here” (Kavadlo 2004, 122) I argue that six main practices are in evidence in the text and that these six socio-spatial modes, taken together, constitute a regional or ‘chorological’ poetics. The six spatial modes I am positing are: spatial production; spatial consumption; landscape; space-time; place; and gender.

In this article, I explore the theme of ‘the existential trap’ in relation to Bukowski's short stories. My objective is to illustrate how these traps are inherently spatial. In order to lay the groundwork for my analysis, I begin the paper by considering the specificity of the short story genre as it relates to the representation of place. I then go on to make a geographical reading of three different spatial traps that recur throughout Bukowski's many volumes of short stories.