Literature, Identity and the English Channel: Narrow Seas Expanded by Dominic Rainsford (review)

Abstract

weakened and in some cases displaced the representational boundary between the simulation and the 'real thing'. This leads to the last section of the book; reconciling immersion and interactivity.Technology is no longer being conceived in terms of an instrumentalrationality,but as something that has its own complex, inscrutablelogic, its own 'mystery'. Interspersedamong the book's chapters are several 'interludes'that focus exclusively on either key literarytexts that foreshadowwhat we now call 'virtualreality', includingthose of Baudelaire,Huysmans,Coover, Ignatiusde Loyola, Calvino, and science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive artforms,likethe hypertext'novel' Twelve Blue,by MichaelJoyce, and I'mYour Man, an interactivemovie. The interludesfunctionin many ways as passagesthat connect the sciences and arts. Ryan treats virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real. And by total art she reinforces Richard Wagner's artworkof the future. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS NIRAN B. ABBAS Literature, Identityand the English Channel:Narrow Seas Expanded.By DOMINIC RAINSFORD. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. vii + 191 pp. ?42.50. ISBN:0-333-77389-6. This is a work of the new cultural geography. It draws initial inspiration from Franco Moretti's argument, in his Atlas of theEuropean Novel,that geography is creativelyactive throughoutliterature.Culturalgeographyembodies both the study of 'space in literature'and of 'literaturein space'. The Channel is a particularly importantgeographicalspace since it marksboth a substantivedivide between two cultures/nations, and yet a link between them. It is something the travellermust pass through. The very distinction in terminology between the idea of the English Channel and the French conception of La Manche(to take a simple example) representsa fundamentallydifferentway of conceiving the same thing (if there be such a 'thing'beyond the verbal constructionsof culture,which is a Derrideanissue explored towardsthe end of the argument). The study begins in the Romantic era (Charlotte Smith's 'Beachy Head' is an obvious and 'literally'prominentexample)and moves ultimatelyto a post-millennial conclusionpost the Channel Tunnel and Thatcherism.This is not merely a literary study, therefore. Initially it raises fundamental questions about the place of geographic frontiersin the relationshipof selfhood and of national identity (Charlotte Smith's concerns) and concludes by asking,for our own epoch, how that selfhood and national identity relate to the idea of 'Europe' and what the place of Britain might be in a European union (or should one write 'England', 'Wales', and 'Scotland'?although, oddly, 'Ireland'is omitted). An obvious historicalparallel to this enquiry would be Jackson Turner's history of the United States and his fundamental exploration of the importance of 'the frontier'in definingAmericanism.A majordifferencebetweenJackson Turner and Dominic Rainsford,however, is that the formerhad a majorthesis (at each stage of development the frontierwas intrinsicin the formationof the nation)and he wrote as an historian. Rainsford, in contradistinction, has no overarching argument weakened and in some cases displaced the representational boundary between the simulation and the 'real thing'. This leads to the last section of the book; reconciling immersion and interactivity.Technology is no longer being conceived in terms of an instrumentalrationality,but as something that has its own complex, inscrutablelogic, its own 'mystery'. Interspersedamong the book's chapters are several 'interludes'that focus exclusively on either key literarytexts that foreshadowwhat we now call 'virtualreality', includingthose of Baudelaire,Huysmans,Coover, Ignatiusde Loyola, Calvino, and science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive artforms,likethe hypertext'novel' Twelve Blue,by MichaelJoyce, and I'mYour Man, an interactivemovie. The interludesfunctionin many ways as passagesthat connect the sciences and arts. Ryan treats virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real. And by total art she reinforces Richard Wagner's artworkof the future. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS NIRAN B. ABBAS Literature, Identityand the English Channel:Narrow Seas Expanded.By DOMINIC RAINSFORD. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. vii + 191 pp. ?42.50. ISBN:0-333-77389-6. This is a work of the new cultural geography. It draws initial inspiration from Franco Moretti's argument, in his Atlas of theEuropean Novel,that geography is creativelyactive throughoutliterature.Culturalgeographyembodies both the study of 'space in literature'and...