Géographies symboliques

Abstract

Over the past few decades, cultural studies have embraced concepts and methodologies set forth by the new fields of inquiry brought about by the “spatial turn”. These new disciplines combine knowledge from the domains of geography and literature in an interdisciplinary way. In my paper I propose to go beyond this dialogue between disciplines to the roots of both geographical and literary representations, that is, I aim to discuss the geographical imaginary. Resorting to concepts from the theory of fictional worlds, I will make a distinction between “realistic” or “mimetic” geographies, “symbolic” geographies, “fictional geographies”, and “allegorical” geographies. I am primarily interested in symbolic geographies and the non-empirical criteria which produced, especially during ancient, medieval and early modern times, cartographical and literary representations of the world that might appear to be fantastical nowadays, but that were nonetheless considered adequate in their respective epoch