Actual Places Research Articles

The Complementarity of Frost and Stevens

The Complementarity of Frost and Stevens Steven Gould Axelrod and Natalie Gerber ONE OF THE well-worn ironies of epoch-fashioning in literature is its tendency to position literary oeuvres in ways that serve the need for distinction and contrast without attesting to the surprising overlaps and conjunctions that exist in the lives and careers of the era’s foremost practitioners. This, in a sentence, is the story of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, two modernist American poets who have emerged—more so than most of their peers—at opposite ends of the modernist spectrum. As we have come to believe, Frost’s ostensible simplicity and directness stand against Stevens’ avowed complexity and abstraction; Frost’s apparent quickness to assume political and ideological stances counterpoints Stevens’ gingerly response to politics and war; Frost’s adherence to inherited metrical forms (whose range is, in memory, reduced to intricately rhymed verse or to a conversational blank verse) casts in relief Stevens’ nonchalant experiments with blank verse and free verse; Frost’s actual places with their sparse human communities forge a literalist simulacrum as against Stevens’ whimsical cognitive structures and his versified geography beyond the human or at least beyond our lifetimes. Even the emphasis of much contemporary Frost scholarship on the annotation and contextualization of primary materials as opposed to the focus of current Stevens scholarship on theoretical analysis could be taken as indicative of an enduring divide between the two poets. With Frost, whose literal style inclines scholarship in one direction, we may assume a fundamental understanding that must be unsettled, whereas for Stevens, whose abstract style inclines scholarship in another, there are still theoretical and critical apparatuses that must be brought to bear to secure our understanding of the work. Perhaps we are transfixed by Frost’s anecdote of their meeting, recounted here in essays by Barron, Kosc, and Hass. According to the story, Stevens remarked that the problem with Frost’s poetry was that it concerns “subjects” (or “things”), and Frost replied that the problem with Stevens’ poetry was that it concerns “bric-a-brac.”1 The message the story transmits is that although Frost’s poetry may err in being too direct, Stevens’ poetry [End Page 1] errs in being flashy or trivial. Frost thinks, whereas Stevens only muses. Frost is at the masculine pole of a gendered conception of discourse, whereas Stevens is at the effeminate pole (implicitly understood to be the less desirable one). Frost is the architect, Stevens the decorator. This binary, of course, mostly reflects Frost’s take on their relationship, and his anxieties about it. As memorable as it is, the story simplifies and distorts the quite complex relations between the two poets and their texts. Under the spell of Frost’s story, we seem to have lost sight of the poets’ mutual fondness for a bevy of actual and symbolic subjects (e.g., birds and New England landscapes and weather) as well as their shared tendency to fashion variegated narratives that depart from the real to include language play, the dreamlike, and the nightmarish. Both poets innovated within the context of prior verse practice; both explored philosophical and psychological dilemmas with subtlety and wit. As much as some biographers, we have bought into their myths, turning a single legendary encounter into the basis of a creative and personal antipathy that may not, in fact, be supported by factual inquiry. Beyond its divisive nature, the reception history of Frost and Stevens includes a unitary, if perhaps melancholy, implication: neither poet still plays a central role in debates about modernism. Frost, for his part, has seen his dissident modernist legacy dismantled, thus erasing our memory that he was, in fact, the first poet to be identified as modern. Stevens’ modernist credentials remain beyond reproach but also, perhaps, beyond widespread engagement: his status has seemed to diminish to a niche in recent years. Returning, then, to explore the two poets’ complementarities via their works, influences, and legacies is an intriguing twenty-first-century exercise for testing narratives of American poetry. And it is important to note the role played by contemporary poets in these reassessments. Many of the recent talks and publications that take Stevens...

Coetzee's Summertime as a Metaleptic Conversation

Coetzee's Summertime as a Metaleptic Conversation Alexandra Effe (bio) The stories we tell about ourselves may not be true, but they are all we have. J. M. Coetzee, The Good Story Dialogue and Truth in Autobiography, History, and Novels Summertime is the third and most experimental volume in J. M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life.1 This autobiographical novel is divided into sections that comprise transcriptions of interviews conducted by the fictional biographer Mr Vincent with acquaintances of the late John Coetzee, a fictional surrogate for J. M. Coetzee. These transcriptions appear in different stages of revision, translation, and narrativization. Notebook entries, allegedly written by John himself, frame the interview sections. The result is a highly fragmented self-representation that continuously transgresses the boundary between real world and storyworld. Summertime's status as autobiography is contentious since the text explicitly links the protagonist to the author but also foregrounds its fictional nature. While, as Coetzee says, "all writing is autobiography" (Doubling the Point 391), Summertime is autobiographical to a higher degree than most novels; at the same time, following Coetzee's dictum that "[a]ll autobiography is storytelling" (391), Summertime is [End Page 252] more novelistic than most autobiography in that it distinguishes between author and character, and between world and storyworld. In Summertime, these levels are linked but remain distinct. The narratological term for the transgression of boundaries between world and storyworld, or between distinct narrative levels in general, is metalepsis, a narrative strategy that often serves to highlight the effects of narrative or interpretative acts. In Summertime, metalepsis foregrounds the responsibilities such acts of narration and interpretation entail and shows that our understanding of self and other depends on stories we tell or that are told about us—stories that may in important respects differ from the real world. In other words, the author to some extent effects what is narrated even as the people and events he writes about exist on a level outside the narrative. Through metalepsis, fictionality can be employed in the service of truth. Coetzee's text signals its fictional status through differences between author and character. Most blatantly, the character John Coetzee is dead while the author J. M. Coetzee is alive and writing. Summertime however also signals factuality through using the author's name and biographical details, and through references to actual events and places. Through metalepsis, the fictional world serves to make statements about the real world. Yet the difference that remains between world and storyworld renders the truth-status of these statements uncertain. Thus the novel strives for, but acknowledges that it must fall short of, what Coetzee himself calls "the one and only truth" (The Good Story 68). Summertime tells a story about Coetzee as an emerging writer in South Africa in the 1970s. We learn about his surrogate John's feelings of shame at being a white South African, about his attempts to respond to the country's socio-political situation, and about his and his family's doubts about the adequacy of a response in the form of literature. Coetzee's employment of metalepsis should be seen in the context of these doubts. His own comments on autobiography and on the notion of truth elucidate why his employment of metalepsis amounts to an ethics of writing and suggest that this ethics is a consequence of the challenges he sees himself facing as a white South-African writer. Commenting on the inaccessibility of truth in his 1984 inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town and in a more recent publication, The Good Story, Coetzee compares the truth-orientation of autobiography to [End Page 253] the truth-orientation of history. "Autobiography," he states, "is usually thought of not as a kind of fiction-writing but as a kind of history-writing with the same allegiance to the truth as history has" ("Truth in Autobiography" 1). In autobiography "you tell the story of yourself as truthfully as you can, or as truthfully as you can bear to" (1). Awareness of the fact that the truth one tells about oneself always comes with such a qualification is, according to Coetzee, "a common postmodern situation" and "an...

Towards the metaphorical transformation of urban space: digital art and the city after web 2.0

A revolução digital tem sido muitas vezes associada à indefinição de fronteiras geográficas, levando a novas formas de reconhecimento e (in)diferenciação territorial. À medida que as distâncias físicas se dissiparam, as barreiras tornaram-se ambíguas e crescentemente condicionadas por reconfigurações digitais de lugares reais ou ficcionados. Depois da Web 2.0, as representações geográficas de cidades foram redefinidas por ligações eletrónicas, abrindo assim o caminho para novas cartografias em rede, paralelas à realidade material, mas não necessariamente dependentes da mesma. Esta transformação metafórica do espaço físico em imagens e informação, permanentemente alteradas, partilhadas e atualizadas na Internet, promoveu uma dialética instável entre as dimensões tangíveis e subjetivas. Enquanto algumas fronteiras tendem a desaparecer, outras estão também a ser criadas, dado que o aparecimento de novos territórios digitais (ou digitalizados), com protocolos de acesso e cartografias específicas, tem gerado novas formas de exclusão social e cultural. Centrando-se na Arte Digital e Pós-Digital, este artigo discute esta situação recente, observando como os artistas contemporâneos têm proposto sistemas alternativos para a apropriação e representação de espaços urbanos. Enviado em: 22 de outubro de 2016.Aprovado em: 15 de novembro de 2016.

Some aspects of a multidimensional analysis of the evolution of ecological-geochemical soil state

Soil saturation index and its calculating are demonstrating multicollinear correlations between ecological-geochemical soil state and environmental circumstances. There are wood ecosystems on the research area with Phaeozem, Luvisol, Retisol and Fluvisol. We have also studied the buried soil. Their burials occurred as a result of natural processes (about 5000 BP) and as a result of human impact (about 1000 BP). Age of separate genetic horizons (from 360±50 to 1870±160 ВР) indicates soils genesis during the last stage of the Holocene – Subatlantic. In our opinion the dynamics of the climate during last stage of the Holocene is the main cause of the complex structure of the soil cover on quite small area (5 km2). Second reason is difficult geomorphological environment (rough topography). On the basis of factor analysis proved efficiency of soil saturation index by trace elements: analytical work only with the indicated index reveals an unambiguous reduce the number of determining factors (up to two) and, thus, the proportion of the variance, which is determined by two factors is 100 %. While the using in the analysis of the total content, or a mobile forms of trace elements, or of some and the others together as a combined using of content mobile forms and their mobility will lead to an increase factor up to four and the simultaneous decrease in the proportion of the variance which is due to these factors to 74–88 %. We did not find decisive influence of any factor on saturation of studied soil types by trace elements. There is always a combination of processes that contribute to the accumulation of trace elements and processes of their migration. There are illuvial and lower transition to soil parent material horizons of the background content of trace elements for all investigated soil except Fluvisol (S-1). Belong to actual places of trace elements accumulation, which is generally quite small are some lower soil horizons both buried soils and lower transition to horizon of soil parent material (in soil R-3). Thus, the upper parts of the soils which were formed during the last centuries (780 years of age to today dated) are characterized by dissipation of most of trace elements. The genetic features of Fluvisol (S-1) have confirmed very high correlation. These features are the result of the genesis of this soil under the influence both soil and sedimentation processes. This is well illustrated in the analysis of the structure of the soil profile, which have characterized by stratification (during soil formation has not resulted in the development of any diagnostic subsurface horizon) genetic horizons and the presence of buried after the accumulation of alluvial material as a humus, as a transitional horizons. Perhaps, it is partly confirmed by the radiocarbon analysis, this soil should be regarded as younger age, which obviously explains persistent inflow of fresh materials. All other soils including the buried ones were formed under various elementary soil formation processes. These processes have replacing each other in time did not stop, and the normal evolution of the soil profile took place to bottom, in contrast to the fluvisol which evolution was to upper as have happened by the fresh alluvial and probably deluvial sedimentation. Recognizing of the «normal» soil genesis process as a basis for the formation of zonal soils in the Holocene, we are interpreting Factor 1, conducted by the context of factor analysis, as the environmental conditions for such soil formation. The results of factor analysis regarding to ecological-geochemical soil state Factor 1 should be considered as the basic parameters of soils (soil organic matter, pH, indicators of soil absorbing complex, mineralogical composition and particle size distribution). Under this condition Factor 2 is associated with the processes (fluvial, sedimentation, erosion) denudation, or transfer and accumulation of different material that would cause disturbance "normal" soil genesis. For that reason ecological-geochemical soil state is determined by soil formation factors for a specific time stage and dominant conditions for some processes.

‘EIN LAND DER ANWESENDEN’: DOROTHEE ELMIGER'S POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH SWITZERLAND

ABSTRACTThe fiction of Dorothee Elmiger combines formal experimentation with political engagement. Her first novel, Einladung an die Waghalsigen (2010), depicts an isolated, stagnant territory which, as in the parables of Max Frisch or Friedrich Dürrenmatt, stands at an allegorical remove from Switzerland. By contrast, the formally starker and thematically bleaker Schlafgänger (2014) engages with disturbing conditions in actual places within or in relation to a Switzerland which is clearly inseparable from the rest of the world. Elmiger's representation of a transnationally connected, porous Switzerland can be interpreted as a response to the recent political swing to the right and to escalating controversies about migration, asylum seekers and foreign policy, and located within the literary discourse of ‘critical patriotism’. In opposing the exclusionist insularity of the ‘Schweizerische Volkspartei’ (SVP), which remains rooted in the popular convictions and propaganda symbols of the Second World War, Elmiger envisages a pluralistic, inclusive country. This imagined community is evoked through an innovative form which has evolved from Elmiger's experimental text, ‘Die Anwesenden’: in polyphonic collaboration, her characters voice an emergent, collective consciousness that registers subtle shifts in sensibility and public discourses and explores complex issues of collective responsibility, complicity or guilt.Dorothee Elmigers Romane verbinden formale Experimentierfreude mit politischem Engagement. Ihr erster Roman, Einladung an die Waghalsigen (2010), erzählt von einem stillgelegten, erstarrten ‘Gebiet’, das wie in den Parabeln von Max Frisch und Friedrich Dürrenmatt in einer allegorischen Distanz zur Schweiz steht. Schlafgänger (2014) hingegen ist sowohl formal radikaler als auch thematisch düsterer und handelt von harten Gegebenheiten in realen Städten, die in einer global vernetzten Schweiz liegen oder Verbindungen zu ihr aufweisen. Elmigers Vorstellung von einer transnationalen, porösen Schweiz wird hier als Antwort auf den politischen Rechtsrutsch und die zunehmenden Kontroversen über Masseneinwanderung, Asylsuchende und Aussenpolitik der letzten Jahre gedeutet und in den literarischen Diskurs des ‘kritischen Patriotismus’ eingeordnet. Als Gegenbild zum abgrenzenden Isolationismus der ‘Schweizerischen Volkspartei’ (SVP), die im Reduit‐Denken und der Igelmentalität der ‘geistigen Landesverteidigung’ verhaftet bleibt, entwickelt Elmiger die Vision eines pluralistischen, inklusiven Landes. Diese imaginierte Gemeinschaft wird durch eine innovative Form evoziert, die aus Elmigers experimentellem Kurztext ‘Die Anwesenden’ herausgewachsen ist: Im Zusammenspiel ihrer sich abwechselnden Stimmen tragen die Figuren zum Entstehungsprozess eines kollektiven Bewusstseins bei, das in der Lage ist, subtile Verschiebungen im subjektiven Empfinden und in öffentlichen Diskursen zu registrieren und heikle Fragen von kollektiver Verantwortung, Komplizenschaft und Schuld auszuloten.

Prime Suspect: William Cowper Prime in the Holy Land and the Identity of “An American” In Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1858

One of the most popular writers for travellers to Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria in the later nineteenth century was William Cowper Prime. His journey of 1855–1856 resulted in two books which went through multiple editions over a period of twenty years, a stimulus to follow in his footsteps and a standard text in the hands of many pious Christians. A series of five long articles published anonymously in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in the mid- to late 1850s can be shown as by Prime. All have been accepted as factual reports of actual events, places, and people but closer examination leaves little doubt they are fictitious. In the light of these conclusions, it is clear Prime had a taste not just for the wild exaggeration parodied by Mark Twain, but also outright invention and we must be cautious in using his writings as sources.

The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. By Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Alexandre Kedar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. 296 pp. $27.95 paper.

The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Geography. By Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Alexandre Kedar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. 296 pp. $27.95 paper.The Expanding Spaces of Law: a timely geography, edited by Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Alexandre Kedar, is the latest contribution to the relatively small body of literature in the geography field. Existing at the intersection between law and geography, geography interrogates the interconnections between law and the spaces it occupies. geography explores how law defines space, looking at the ways in which the law tangibly impacts the everyday use of a particular place or geographical space. In the process of so acting, geographers argue that law is not an inert set of rules, but instead is active in formulating the rules and processes by which society understands and navigates actual places. Those familiar with geography will recognize the editors for their seminal contributions toward establishing the geography field. In past work, the editors' individual research has been diverse touching on a breadth of topics,- such as works on territoriality, the city, post colonialism, zoo regulation, homelessness, property, and racism and the law-all entailing an element of critical perspective. In this latest work, The Expanding Spaces of Law contains an introduction and 10 stand-alone chapters. The introduction provides a substantive overview of the development of geography scholarship, outlining its key contributions, and a succinct summary of its aims and foundations. The diverse subjects contained in the chapters make the volume dynamic, and of interest for those working in critical perspectives of law in addition to those already working in the geography field.Seemingly disparate, the volume contributions approach their subject matter with the benefit of the clearest articulation of the aims of geography seen in the literature to date. Thus, although the 10 chapters in the volume are insightful and diverse, the most significant section in The Expanding Spaces of Law is the introduction where the editors provide a comprehensive overview of the body of work that constitutes legal geography. In the introduction, the editors explain the intimate connection between law and geography, focusing on the role of space: Legal geographers contend that in the of lived social relations and experience, aspects of the social that are analytically identified as either or spatial are conjoined and co-constituted (p. 1). In turn, distinctly forms of meaning are projected onto every segment of the physical world (p. 1). Understanding, elaborating on, and critiquing the nature and impacts of this symbiosis relationship between space and the informs geography literature.The editors chart the trajectory of geography from being, initially, a study of law and geography, whereby the fields borrowed from one another, but without any direct engagement with each other; to then become an interdisciplinary pursuit with a joint research agenda (p. 9). The editors argue that currently a third wave of geography research takes a transdisciplinary approach, whereby disciplines other than law or geography are seeking to further understanding of (legal) space to include social and humanities studies (p. 10). The editors identify the ongoing challenge in geography scholarship of bridging the gap between studies and geography, through a common theoretical understanding. They urge deeper analysis and even more research in different subject-areas to overcome this false divide, and to realize the potential of geography scholarship.In the remainder of the text, the contributing authors more than meet the call for broader scope of disciplinary approaches and subject matter by carrying out detailed case study analysis of diverse geographies. …

Keeping Open by Re-Imagining Laughter and Fear

Speaking to the debate on the nature of critique, this article is about the struggle to produce an account when listening to and retelling stories. It begins with the disconcertment over listening to a coherent story that emerges in interviews about the development of performance indicators for Dutch hospital care. The indicators are presented as solutions to the problem of unruliness in the healthcare world. Drawing on Helen Verran's work on generative critique I slow down the ‘problem-solution-found’ plot. Instead of contrasting the apparently coherent stories with the complexities of an ‘underlying’ practice of healthcare, I hold on to my initial disconcertment so that ‘fleetingly subtle’ interruptions become entry points for generative critique. Taking Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's understanding of the relation that fear and laughter have to alterity, I show how fear and laughter permit generative critique within seemingly coherent stories. In the case of indicator development, the interviewees ‘laugh away’ what they consider alter from quality and safety in healthcare: having no control over what is going on, polyglotism instead of a common language, and inaction as opposed to taking one's time. Paying attention to disconcerting interruptions generates sensitivity and questions rather than yet another set of (critical) problem-solution-found answers. How can ridiculed (laughed away) subjectivity be acknowledged as important entry points for including alterity in supervision? And how to position the acknowledgement, not as an antidote, but as a way of rendering the fear of alterity generative? Nurturing sensitivities is crucial for keeping open, which means resisting both the sticky tendency of normalizing accounts and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I conclude that keeping open by re-imagining critique resonates with the creativity of collective life in actual times and places. Thereby it offers a promising potential for doing worlds differently.

Home birth is unsafe: AGAINST: Safe for whom?

First, we question the underlying premise of this debate: that hospital birth is inherently safe. There has been much discussion regarding the ‘cascade of interventions’ that has become ubiquitous, at least in US hospital settings, and which culminates in caesareans—many of which are medically unnecessary—for over 30% of labouring women. Caesareans result in substantial morbidity, both in the current and subsequent pregnancies, and interventions drive up the cost of birth to unsustainable levels. This is the standard towards which we should strive? An examination of the studies cited by those on each side of this debate reveals an interesting pattern: proponents and opponents are relying on two distinct types of data sources. Proponents tend to cite studies that use data from perinatal registries, which capture both intended and actual places of birth. Registry-based research, much of it population-based, from Canada, the UK (Birthplace in England Collaborative Group BMJ 2011;343:d7400), Norway, the Netherlands (de Jonge et al. BJOG 2015;122:720–728), and the US (Cheyney et al. J Midwifery Womens Health 2014;59:17–27) all report similar outcomes for low-risk women. Homebirth in these studies is consistently associated with high rates of normal physiologic birth (caesarean rates <10%), low morbidity, reduced healthcare costs, low intrapartum and neonatal death rates but with, unsurprisingly, higher intrapartum mortality for higher-risk births (Cheyney et al., as above). Opponents tend to cite studies based on US vital statistics data. These studies (Grunebaum et al. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2014;211: 390e1–7), and one controversial meta-analysis (Wax et al. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2010;203: 243.e1–8), argue that homebirth is associated with elevated neonatal death rates. Unfortunately, birth certificates in the USA do not universally capture planned place of birth, which leads to misclassification bias when conducting analyses that require an intention-to-treat model. Why, then, is there still a debate about the basic safety question? Homebirth clearly can be as safe (and for some outcomes, safer) than hospital birth (de Jonge et al., as above). Registry-based research, conducted in multiple cultural settings, medical systems, and with enormous variability in training of midwives, supports this conclusion. Certainly it is safe in settings where homebirth midwives are well integrated into the overall healthcare system, as evidenced by the extremely low intrapartum mortality rates achieved in the Netherlands (de Jonge et al., as above). The questions we should be asking instead are: ‘Safe for whom?’ and ‘Under which circumstances?’ What the balance of evidence suggests is that homebirth safety may be contingent upon getting certain things right: the patient population, the collaborative relationships between midwives and physicians, and the transfer criteria. These contingent factors are not yet in place everywhere, including in the US. Yet, the strength of the Netherlands data is that it demonstrates that homebirth can be safe; where it is not, this should prompt critical reform of practice, not retreat from homebirth as an option. Finally, although this conversation has been dominated by discourses of risk and danger, homebirth is also clearly associated with less frequently discussed benefits: high rates of breastfeeding, normal physiologic birth, and patient satisfaction. Let us move beyond this polarising debate on whether homebirth is safe, towards a more nuanced and collaborative research agenda aimed at improving access to high-quality maternity care for all women, across all settings. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.

Public Interior:

Architect Manuel de Sola?-Morales was one of the first designers to stress the importance of public interiors – places that are used as public spaces although they might belong to a private owner.1 Examples are libraries, hospitals or shopping malls. However, included within the concept of the public interior are also publicly owned spaces such as arcades, passages and inner courtyards, as well as collective outdoor public areas that provide shelter such as bus shelters (Figure1).These are spaces that Kristiaan Borret, the former city architect for Antwerp, describes as ‘secondary public spaces’. They differ from the so called ‘primary public spaces’, that is to say the actual streets, market places and squares.2 Complex interior environments are often subject to commercial logic or developer standards, factors that tend to make them less public. The layout of public interiors ought to be considered a challenging field of design and research, but this is not always the case. Where the ‘primary public space’, in particular, has long been the focus of research within the scholarly field of urban design and urbanism, existing research into public interiors proves to be fragmented. While ‘toolboxes’ for urban planners have been established, they lack the perspectives traditionally found in the field of interior architecture and interior design, such as user-relations, atmospheric variables and furniture design.Yet these considerations are particularly relevant to the conditions found within public interiors. Besides defining the term ‘public interior’, this paper aims to contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary design approach by exploring various methods for the analysis of ‘the public interior’ in the fields of urbanism, architecture, interior design and related academic fields.

Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative ed. by Robert T. Tally Jr. (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative ed. by Robert T. Tally Jr. Lauren Elkin Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative. Robert T. Tally Jr., ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 236. $74.77 (cloth). We are accustomed to thinking of maps as narratives—as visual accounts of the cultures that produce them. But the wide-ranging, incisive essays in Robert J. Tally’s interdisciplinary new collection not only reverse this proposition by reading narratives as maps, but they go a step further to suggest that map-making is what narratives do: they are “mapping machines” (3). All narratives, Tally argues, “may be said to constitute forms of literary cartography” (1). The relationship between the narrative and the map conjugates in varying ways in these essays. Tally’s introduction begins with James Joyce’s comment that in Ulysses he tried to create a portrait of Dublin which would be so exact that if the city were to vanish from the earth “it could be reconstructed out of my book” (Qtd. on 1); meanwhile, authors like Thomas Hardy or China Miéville more or less invent regions and cities. But can Joyce’s Dublin be said to be more “real” than Hardy’s Wessex? To the extent that literary places “exist” in discourse, they are invented and maintained through the ideas readers have of them. The “cartographic impulse” is not a question of authorial intent but a way of understanding space as “necessarily embedded with narratives” (2), and narrative as both subject and object: “something that maps and something to be mapped” (3). The medievalist Robert Allen Rouse makes the important point that different periods of history in different parts of the world have had very different ideas about what a “map” is. The scarcity of actual maps in medieval Western Europe means that the geographical knowledge of the audience at the time would have been narrative rather than visual. They would have heard or read about a “tripartite” vision of the world, divided into Europe, Asia, and Africa, occasionally laid out in what we now call a T-and-O map (26). (There are no illustrations in the text, perhaps in a bid to consider maps purely as narratives, so readers unfamiliar with this image must Google it). It is our bias as modern readers to suppose that all ages and times have had a visual relationship to maps and topography. Moreover, Rouse argues, through a consideration of a medieval romance text called Kyng Alisaunder, this narrative mode of knowing the world corresponds to “the way in which aristocratic power operates in the real medieval world,” given that “Alexander’s legend was one of the influential models of empire invoked in the medieval period” (27). Rouse’s introduction makes an important contribution by encouraging the reader to suspend her notion of what a map looks like for the rest of the essays in this volume. These essays contend with the “worldliness” of the modernist moment, Tally writes, “as the most personal experiences of the everyday are somehow connected to a vast, imperial network” (7). Heather McNaugher charts the term cosmopolitan in E. M. Forster’s Howards End, finding a narrative “ambivalence” attached to this idea of “worldliness” as it sits uncomfortably close to imperialism: Wilcoxes and Schlegels are not as conceptually distant from each other as they [End Page 407] might like to think. (McNaugher’s discussion of imperialists and motor cars curiously does not mention Fredric Jameson’s important essay, “Modernism and Imperialism,” which explores the themes of motoring and the Great North Road in Howards End.) In Susan E. Cook’s essay on Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Brontë, Tess and Lucy Snowe become “mapped subjects who experience national identity as isolation and death” (62). Cook’s reading of the fictional county of Wessex is one of the strongest in the collection. Along with his invented locales, Hardy repur-poses actual places in Dorset so that nowhere is “uniformly fictional or factual,” creating a hybrid rural imaginary which “challenge[s] the homogeneity of the nation” (63). This indeterminacy is mirrored in Tess’s patronymic fluidity, between D’Urbervilles and Durbeyfield, and then gets mapped back onto the...

Adaptation-induced Tourism for Consumers of Literature on Screen: the Experience of Jane Austen Fans

My aim in this article is that of starting to relate the expanding research field of adaptation studies to the subject area of film-induced tourism. Adaptations are a specific typology of films: that is, films whose story was not originally intended for the screen but, more often than not, for the written page, and has, therefore, been ‘translated’ into a new medium. The phenomenon of adaptation has been at the center of a heated debate for a few years now, but the specific link between adaptation and tourism has not yet been studied in its own right. In my article I question why and how adaptations of literary texts for the screen can induce a desire to visit film locations (actual geographical places) in readers who are also inclined to enjoy the experience of “literature on screen”. In order to do this, I focus on the case study of adaptations from Jane Austen’s novels and on a specific kind of tourists, the so called ‘Janeites’, or Austen fans.

Performative productions of space and their materializations: Soul kitchen – the movie – and Soulkitchen – the arts center

Complementing geographical film analyses which mostly differentiate between representations of spaces in films on the one hand and imaginations of spaces resulting from films on the other, this contribution focuses on the effects of visual representations on spatial structures and their implementations. Taking Fatih Akin’s film soul kitchen (2009) as example, the performativity of visual representations and their materialization is discussed. Instead of being demolished - as it was originally planned after the shooting - the old storage hall in Hamburg-Wilhemsburg that functions as a restaurant in the film, was turned into a noncommercial cultural and arts center, surrounded by a revitalizing neighborhood. In addition to the conceptual considerations on the performativity of filmic images and their spatial materialization, the paper thus discusses the production of space in the context of local urban development policies and beyond its imagination: how film images and imaginations constitute actual places and spaces - and the ways this materialization is capable of resulting in political activities.

Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful: At Long Last, Cather's Letters

Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful: At Long Last, Cather's LettersThis review essay explores the profound scholarly significance of the publication of Selected Letters of Willa Cather, a nearly 700-page collection scrupulously edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (Knopf, 2013). volume contains 566 full-text transcriptions selected from the 3,000 Cather letters now known to exist and makes them accessible in print for the first time. Cather's will, executed in 1943, forbade not only publication of her letters but even direct quotation from them, so biographers and critics for decades engaged in a kind of shadowboxing as they sought to convey Cather's thoughts and feelings through the awkward constraint of paraphrase. Now that the testamentary restrictions have been lifted and this volume is available, scholars and fans can hear Cather's epistolary voice without traveling to archives. An extraordinary contribution to Cather studies, the Selected Letters offers much to anyone interested in twentieth-century American literature, women writers, or LGBT/queer studies.Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful: At Long Last, Cather's Letters THE SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLA CATHER. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. xix + 715 pp. $37.50.Novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947) was fond of quoting a line from the French historian Jules Michelet: The end is nothing; the road is all (Not Under Forty 99). In the latter days of the 1980s, as a graduate student, I spent a lot of time on the road in an unreliable car with Cather on my mind as I traveled from one archive to another reading the author's letters. I did so because that was the only way to access them. There was no published collection of the letters of one of the twentieth century's foremost writers because Cather's will, executed in 1943, forbade any publication of her letters. will went further, even prohibiting direct quotation from the documents. And so I, like generations of scholars before me, dutifully made my way around the country to hold often-fragile missives in my hands and frantically scribble down notes and transcriptions on legal pads that are now themselves growing fragile from age and the moisture in my basement study. That is what archival research was like before laptops and portable scanners, and that was part of the cost, to scholars, of Willa Cather's will.My project was not fundamentally biographical, but I did not feel I should rely on the paraphrases of others, particularly of letters that spoke in some way to Cather's relationship to the sex and gender norms of the late nineteenth century. Those issues were central to my dissertation and the book that grew out of it (Lindemann), and they were highly contentious ones in Cather studies at the time. I needed to know exactly what she said when she wrote to her college crush Louise Pound about how she felt about the prospect of being apart from Louise during the summers of 1892 and 1893. A proximate sense would be insufficient, and so I logged many hundreds of miles in an ugly gray compact that had a weird and unfixable habit of stalling out in summer storms. I like to think Cather would have been impressed with my intrepid pursuit of the truth, put out as she might have been with my focus on her love life. As a writer who produced stories rooted in actual people, places, and events, she herself logged many thousands of miles, by train, by car, and even on horseback, in the interest of research.I offer this anecdote of old-school archival research as a way of underscoring and celebrating the profound scholarly significance of the publication, at long last, of Selected Letters of Willa Cather. One hesitates to use the word monumental, but such praise in this instance is doubly warranted. That term accurately describes both the book's size (it is just over 700 pages long) and the difference it will make to a field long hobbled by the lack of such a volume. …

The FRAPORT Case of the First Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court and its Public Forum Doctrine: Case Note

The application of constitutionally granted communication-related rights assumes the existence of public space as a basic requirement for human encounters. Mass media, such as television, internet, radio, or journals, does not completely satisfy people's general communicative needs. Instead, people need actual places where they have the opportunity to confront other individuals face to face with their opinion. Indeed, some forms of communication require a more spacious area than is owned by individuals, or can only fulfill their purpose at specific locations. Protest marches or rallies, for example, are important in raising public awareness and encouraging a broader exchange of opinions with a wider circle of recipients. Public space is the site to exchange ideas and opinions and thus the location for individuals to confront the public with political disputes, societal conflicts, and other matters. Traditionally, market places, pedestrian areas, public streets, and squares offered such sites. They are not only seen as places for consumption and means of transportation, but also as places of communication and human encounters. Hence, in this capacity, public space is the prerequisite for the actualization of the freedom of assembly and general communication-related rights, which on their part—and thereby also the existence of public forums—are the foundations of democratic decision-making and can be seen as a constituting element of a free democratic basic order.

Teaching Tarleton

Teaching Tarleton

Teaching Tarleton

Teaching Tarleton

Journeys beyond pages: The use of fiction in tourism

The paper aims at looking into the examples of most popular literary induced tours on the European continent in order to establish interconnectivity between works of fiction as created cultural forms and their impact on tourism industry and consumer society. Accordingly, not only does the human urge to travel refer to the phenomenon of escapism and escapism into fictional, but it is also intrinsically linked to the fact of recreating oneself, i.e. finding one's own destiny/destination. Therefore, the focus is on the acknowledgement that fictional is employed in the non-fictional setting so as to produce man-made tourist attractions. Thus, the illusion of the fictional is perpetuated into the actual places used as attractions for avid readers and cinephiles. For instance, 221b Baker Street in London known as the Sherlock Holmes's home is recreated in reality and made into a museum for those intrigued by the mystery of Conan Doyle's fiction. The tourist is thus perceived both as a consumer and homo ludens in the postmodern contemporary context. The same way as a reader immerses into the text, the tourist embarks on a journey. Thus, various literary tours represent a twofold experience of the fictional world.

AMERICA’S HEARTLAND: A CASE FOR SOCIAL RESILIENCE?

IntroductionHeartland is a nonspecific term used more commonly in the media and in literature than in social science. Unlike homeland, which has been used to designate the entire United States since the attacks on September 11, 2001, heartland connotes an ill-defined part of the nation, a central geographic region in which traditional values prevail. In blogs and newspapers, the heartland is typically the Midwest, small towns, and places distant in space and time from large cities and centers of recent immigration or technological innovation. Although the heartland in these accounts is a place in which something wholesome and somehow genuinely American is found-the real America, as political candidates sometimes argue-it is also associated with the past and decline more than with the future and growth.Imagining the heartland as a Venn diagram where the closest meaning occurs at the intersection of three overlapping circles provides a more precise definition of the term. The first circle refers to the part of the nation that lives in rural areas, which included 19 percent of the US population in 2010. The second circle refers to small towns with populations less than 25,000, of which there were approximately 15,000 in 2010 that were located outside of census-defined urban areas. The third circle refers to inland parts of the nation, which extend from Virginia and Tennessee to Wyoming and Idaho, and from North and South Dakota to Oklahoma and Arkansas, and regions that exclude California and Florida, but include parts of Texas and Upstate New York. In recent presidential elections, a majority of inland states have voted Republican, which is one of the reasons that the term heartland is associated in media accounts with conservative politics and traditional values.Heartland in this conception includes, but is not restricted to, topics that have been of central interest in rural sociology. In addition, the values, beliefs, and public connotations associated with the term are of particular interest among cultural and political sociologists. These cultural and political topics refer as much to particular constructions of space and time as they do to actual places and populations. Studies emphasizing these topics include investigations of where people think the heartland or particular regions such as the Midwest or Middle West are located (Shortridge 1989), analyses of local and regional subcultures in literature and music (Griswold and Wright 2004; Peterson 1999), and discussions of nostalgia, attachments to place, notions of home, and arguments about authenticity (Erickson 1995; Cameron and Gatewood 1994).Although sociological interest sometimes focuses on regional geography, the more relevant analytical aspects of heartland in these terms are the relatively small size of populations involved in considering the social and cultural dynamics of families, neighborhoods, and communities; the relative economic importance of agriculture, agribusiness, and extractive industries such as mining, oil, and gas compared with manufacturing, services, and the professions; and the effects of location, race and ethnicity, and cultural legacies that may combine to forge distinctive values, beliefs, and identities. From its inception, the sociological literature has dealt extensively with questions about these aspects of demography, economic structure, and culture, and in recent years has developed theoretically grounded arguments about social change in the communities and regions involved. At the same time, sociological interests are sufficiently concentrated on topics located in large urban places and presumed to be of greatest relevance there, such as urban neighborhoods, urban poverty, urban schools, urban segregation, and urban ethnicity and immigration. Therefore, examining topics outside of these places necessarily provides opportunities for interesting comparisons.The classic theoretical formulations were so closely associated with observations about the shifts from agrarian to industrial society and from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft that tracing these arguments is tantamount to reviewing the entirety of the discipline's intellectual development. …

Space and Place in Goethe’s “Alexis und Dora”

In a letter to Schiller of August 16,1797, Goethe describes how theRaum meines grosvaterlichen Hauses, Hofes und Gartens, der aus dem beschranktesten, patriarchalischen Zustande, in welchem ein alter Schultheis von Frankfurt lebte, durch klug unternehmende Menschen zum nutzlichen Waarenund Marktplatz verandert wurde. Die Anstalt ging durch sonderbare Zufalle bey dem Bombardement zu Grunde und ist jetzt, grostentheils Schutthaufen, noch immer das doppelte dessen werth was vor 11 Jahren von den gegenwartigen Besitzern an die Meinigen bezahlt worden.1[space of my grandfather's house, yard, and garden was changed by clever, enterprising people from most limited, patriarchal condition in which an old mayor of Frankfurt lived into a useful commodityand marketplace. The establishment was destroyed by strange coincidences during bombardment [of July 1796] and is now-for most part as a pile of rubble-still twice worth of what present owners paid to my family 11 years ago.2]Goethe traces how, in a relatively brief period of time, nature and value of a place was transformed. Despite its demolition, his grandfather's house managed to double in economic value. And its change in value was not only financial, for transformation of this place also reflects a transformation in social and value systems. Before it was sold, it represented patriarchy and authority, a limited (beschranktesten) or retrograde way of life, yet after its sale, individual authority in a restricted realm gave way to authority of commodity exchange on a larger financial market. A personal connection to place-memory of grandfather-gave way to a perception of space as impersonal and economically determined. The home of Goethe's grandfather became not only a site of exchange (Waarenund Marktplatz) but also an object of exchange itself (he refers to its resale value after bombardment of late July 1796).The changed perception of a personal place into an impersonal space intimates larger changes within society such as transformation from a feudalistic to a capitalistic order. It indicates that with changes in social structures, conceptions of place and space were changing as well. Goethe's texts reflect changing conceptions of place and space around 1800. They reflect an important transitional moment in shift from place to space, in which distinction between two concepts becomes fluid.Place and Space circa 1800The end of eighteenth century witnessed transformation of concepts of place and space, where place is a unity of human experience and locale and space is a more abstract, impersonal conception, such as Cartesian space. In gradual move toward modernism, relation to locale in terms of place gave way to a focus on space, a move that later nineteenth century would attempt unsuccessfully to reverse. Connection with and immediate experience of locale yielded to displacement and abstraction.The move toward space at this time is evident in German Romanticism. For example, Bruno Hillebrand describes idealistic tendencies of Romanticism als Hohepunkt aller Realitatsferne und damit auch RaumEntfremdung (as culmination of all distance from reality and thus of alienation from space as well).3 In a more recent study, Andrew Cusack argues that from the metaphysical idea of a world in flux and insecure and frequently nomadic nature of their lives grew tendency of romantics to conceive of themselves as wanderers.4 In Romanticism, motif of wandering binds metaphysical insecurity to a tenuous relationship to place. Romanticism reflects a distancing from or defamiliarization of actual places in favor of ideal or abstract spaces.Kate Rigby links romantic experience of place to dislocation, largely in connection with modernization of agriculture and beginnings of industrialization at home.5 Clearly, new developments in material and conceptual worlds were transforming concept of place around 1800. …