Volume 64, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Space, Place, and Narrative / Issue Editors: Laura Bieger and Nicole Maruo-Schröder

Our notions of space and place are deeply invested with narrative – to the degree that one can think of storytelling as a spatial form and practice. Critical engagements with space and place have bypassed these investments so far since narrative is firmly associated with matters of time whereas space, commonly perceived as the stable backdrop to history’s transformative operations, is yet to be emancipated from the dominance of time. Parallel to reconstructing space in ways that bring out its own productivity, narratologists have been reassessing narrative’s vastly neglected relation to space. This essay zooms in on two venues of this work: on general recalibrations of the relation of space and narrative, and on the spatial metaphors evoked and employed by it. Linking these reassessments of narrative spatiality to on-going revisions of representational narrativity, I hope to show how these parallel strands of critical rethinking can deepen our understanding of both space and narrative – if they are brought to converge.

The River Rouge, which flows through Michigan into the Great Lakes at Detroit, has been a contested space, from the Mound Builders c. 1100 AD to the present. The river’s changing uses and meanings provide a microcosm of North American history, including Native Americans, French fur traders, the British, American settlers, small-scale industries, and Henry Ford’s largest factory. Narratives treat the river as a landscape, as a highway, as a natural resource, as raw material, as a minor detail, or as a threatened environment. The river has been part of a romantic view of pre-history, a heroic story of colonial conquest, a tale of democratic expansion into new land, an exemplary second creation in which unfinished nature is transformed into the world’s largest factory, a narrative of class warfare between workers and capitalists, a tale of the triumph of democracy over National Socialism in World War II, a tragic story of the exploitation of nature, and a recovery narrative in which the river is rescued from pollution and misuse.

Particularly during the westward expansion, the frontier was not just a concrete site of conquest, exploration, and settlement but also a space of projection and imagination of (future) possibilities. People not only imagined the frontier in a variety of sometimes incompatible ways. They also used such imaginations to process and order their experience of the concrete, ‘real-life’ space so that the frontier becomes a space in which both, the lived and the imagined space, overlap and merge. This essay looks at how two popular antebellum writers used material objects and related cultural practices in their narrative construction of frontier space, arguing that, from this perspective, narrative space ceases to be only a property of the text and extends into the object world. Drawing on their own experience of life in the east, Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham use gender- and class-based ideologies of taste and refinement to make the unknown space of the frontier meaningful and familiar, thus turning it from a mere place to live into something like a home. Such a use of material culture in the narrative construction of this space allows both writers to comment on and shape the ideological underpinnings of the frontier and, by extension, take part in the (narrative) construction of future America.

This essay argues that the best way to discuss the ‘meaning’ of a building is to describe it as a peripatetic narrative. In order to discuss buildings as spatial stories, I will begin by defining narrative as a meaningful sequence of events, signs, lines, scenes, places, spaces, etc., in which each component assumes its meaning primarily through its relation to other parts of the sequence that precede and follow it. This definition of narrative allows me to think of a building as a proto-cinematic apparatus in which the architect carefully arranges a set of different scenes, impressions, objects, experiences, and views into meaningful sequences that unfold before and around the moving spectator passing along a set of possible itineraries. In describing these scenes and itineraries and setting them into relation to the building’s cultural context, we can begin to ‘read’ buildings as important cultural artifacts that play an active role in the institution of society and can be studied to gain insights into the communities for and by which they were built. These claims will be applied and tested in a discussion of Louis Sullivan’s and Dankmar Adler’s Auditorium Building in Chicago.

My essay brings into focus the ways in which Petru Comarnescu – the first Romanian Americanist – depicted the Los Angeles of the late 1920s, and it shows that his cultural encounter triggered both processes of representation and of misrepresentation, giving rise to varying cultural constructions of place. This is tied to the fact that making the new and unfamiliar meaningful presupposes a continuous process of ‘translation’ laden with approximations, misconceptions, distortions, half-truths, and varying authenticities. When Comarnescu sought to pin down otherness, it was the familiar which resurfaced, and the cultural heritage of the place left behind ‘taught’ the traveler what and how to see. In doing so, travel writings could best exemplify that cultural boundaries are fluid and permanently drawn and redefined.

How to become modern and, simultaneously, return to sources, how to integrate historical progress and the preservation and availability of cultural traditions has been variously described as a major dilemma of modernity. Underlying this dilemma are differing notions of home and of the role of places and regions in a staggeringly globalized, technology-driven civilization. Regionalist movements, such as Agrarianism in the South of the US, have thrived on their antipathy to a fast changing modern world; they have also promulgated a renewed sense of place and a return to regional history and traditions. The essay discusses critical regionalists’ celebration of the local and the region; in so doing it also looks at two representatives of opposing notions of home in modernity, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. Finally, it contends that it is primarily by way of narrative and storytelling that a sense of place, of being-in-the-world can be reconstructed.