Literary Cartography Research Articles

Somewhere between the Nahḍa and the Nadal: toward a rhizomatic cartography of Hispanophone Moroccan literature

The great variety of Hispanophone Moroccan literature evades facile categorization and breaks down identity qualifiers. It exists, yet it refuses to be easily categorized: is it a Moroccan literature that just happens to be expressed in Spanish? Or is it a peripheral Spanish literature that has grown out of the historical proximity and connections between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb? This long, shared history complicates a simple description of these works as “postcolonial literature,” and suggests what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizomatic literary cartography. This project seeks to engage with these questions of literary identity in Hispanophone Moroccan literature in order to consider the competing factors contributing to this unique literary phenomenon. My thesis is that Hispanophone Moroccan literature must be understood as a rhizomatic cartography. If it is considered as a peripheral Spanish or postcolonial literature, we risk overlooking many of its valuable contributions to the Hispanophone literary canon.

Maize Landscapes in Indigenous Literatures: Toward Alternative Cartographic Imaginaries

Abstract The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a literary revival in the Indigenous languages of the region known canonically as “Latin America.” Across this varied corpus, a major theme is the cultural significance of maize. This article compares the depiction of maize in four bilingual poems, each written in a different Indigenous language alongside Spanish: Nahuatl (Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez), Yucatec Maya (María Dolores Dzul Barboza), Central Quechua (César Vargas Arce), and Southern Quechua (Emilio Corrales). Through close textual analysis and by recourse to theoretical perspectives such as “literary cartography,” the “textual continuum,” “deep mapping,” and “trans-indigeneity,” the article argues that each poem communicates culturally specific ways of understanding geography that, when set in dialogue, challenge hegemonic definitions of the Western Hemisphere such as North, South, or Latin “America.” Rather, the poems in combination weave an interconnected yet multiperspectival cartographic tapestry with maize as the common thread.

Mapping identity and place in Yongping Li’s The End of the River

ABSTRACT This article offers to postcolonial literary studies a case study of Borneo grappling with its colonial legacy and cultural identity by exploring the dynamic interplay between place and identity in Yongping Li’s two-volume novel, Da He Jin Tou (The End of the River). Using a theoretical framework rooted in postcolonial geo-humanities, including the concept of place in postcolonialism, Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of “topophilia”, and Robert Tally’s literary cartography, the article argues that Li’s mapping of Borneo as a dynamic interactive space offers entry into a process of affective identification that transcends national borders and ethnicity. To achieve this, the article first contextualizes Li’s Borneo writing within a postcolonial spatial framework, and then proceeds to analyse the novel, highlighting a meeting between Tuan’s humanistic geography as related to place and affective bond, and Tally’s literary mapping of spatiality to demonstrate Li’s identification with the textured and affectively charged Borneo.

La cartographie littéraire au défi de l’éditorialisation

Comment cartographier un corpus littéraire sans cesse en mouvement, qui ne semble connaître aucune fin (ni même comprendre d'origine bien définie), dont les frontières se reconfigurent continuellement, et auquel participent de multiples contributeurs ? En un mot : comment cartographier un corpus littéraire éditorialisé ? Cet article propose une réflexion à la fois littéraire et épistémologique. Il s'agit d'interroger la relation entre deux gestes d'écriture : le geste cartographique du chercheur et le travail d'éditorialisation tel qu'il est déployé par les écrivains et écrivaines qui ont choisi le web pour terrain de jeu. À travers le récit d'une entreprise (plus ou moins manquée) de cartographie d'un corpus – le projet Général Instin – on proposera une reconfiguration de la notion de corpus natif numérique, dans laquelle la notion d'éditeur, et plus spécifiquement celle de notion éditoriale, est amenée à jouer un rôle essentiel.

Centering Place in Tawfiq Canaan’s Literary Cartography

In the early-twentieth century, Palestinian physician and ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan published roughly forty-five studies on the cultural and narrative traditions of the largest section of Palestinian society, the fellaheen (peasantry). In this article, the author examines how Canaan’s expansive collection of stories related to holy sites across Palestine in Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927) produces a provocative literary cartography—a narrative that operates much like a map. In so doing, she contends that Canaan both contests orientalist constructions of the Holy Land as frozen in biblical time and, critically, unsettles the very spatiotemporal logic governing dominant colonial narrations of place. This epistemic shift, the author concludes, is the result of Canaan’s recentering of Indigenous Palestinian place-based knowledge as both the subject and method of his study. This approach offers instructive lessons applicable within and beyond the disciplinary, regional, and temporal boundaries that have so far circumscribed the study and reception of Canaan’s work.

Hebrew Gomel: Space, Genre, Modernity

Abstract: This article explores the understudied role of Gomel as an important center of literary production during the emergence of Hebrew modernism at the turn of the twentieth century. Prominent writers such as Gershon Shofman, Yosef Haim Brenner, and Uri Nissan Gnessin fostered personal and literary dialogues in and with the city. By combining various methodological approaches—New Historicism, literary cartography, and regional history—we analyze the unique spatial dynamics that sparked Gomel's transformation into a laboratory of Hebrew modernism. While grounding our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin in the spatial turn in literary theory, we argue that these three canonical Hebrew writers created literary texts that captured the urban experience of this eastern European Jewish metropolis. We trace the evolution of Hebrew texts written in Gomel from a synchronic perspective and construct a detailed description of the town's literary-cum-cultural history. At the same time, we focus on Gomel's broader historical and geographical status within the Pale of Settlement and demonstrate how each of the three writers used a different literary genre—the urban miniature, the novel, and the novella—to create a unique representation of Gomel's urban space. Furthermore, by focusing on the chronotope of Gomel, our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin underscore that these texts are grounded in Gomel's urban fabric through particular forms of local belonging, rather than an abstract notion of "uprooted" existence.

Caryl Phillips's interstitial poetics

ABSTRACT The “spatial turn” in literary studies has challenged the perception that time is the fundamental organising principle of fiction and has drawn attention to the ways in which writers create literary cartographies. In a similar vein, postcolonial critics have foregrounded the role of “contact zones” and investigated the “third space” in between cultures as productive sites of interconnectedness, while also simultaneously laying bare the “labour of translation” that takes place in the territories reconfigured by the colonial domination. This article highlights the centrality of space in Caryl Phillips’s novels on transatlantic slavery and argues how, through a meticulous exploration of multiple spaces of transit and of the characters who inhabit them, the author suggestively lays out an interstitial poetics. Within Phillips’s composite oeuvre, the investigation of transatlantic slavery and its legacy is a pivotal, recurring theme. In his works, Phillips dwells on the liminal spaces that emerged in the context of the Middle Passage and the institution of slavery. As this article will argue, by reimagining the Black Atlantic as contiguous to the imperial centre, Phillips complicates the geography of colonial and imperial Britain.

Touring in the time of COVID-19: digital maps and the virtual teaching of Palestinian travel writing

ABSTRACT The employment of digital media and e-materials in the classroom in the time of Covid-19 in Palestine has generated much attention among scholars, researchers and teachers. One of these electronic resources is digital maps which have recently become enriching and transformative ways of learning in different educational and pedagogical settings in Palestinian academic institutions. The lack of physical mobility due to continued governmental enforcements of lockdown laws in the Palestinian Occupied Territories hindered many teachers, students and researchers in the field of national cartography and human geography, many of whom were faced with dire challenges in exploring local landscapes outlined in Palestinian travel writing. This article examines the vital role of using digital maps in teaching Palestinian cartographic fiction. While it notes the value of students’ geographic practices in the field, it explores the benefits of using digital maps in the higher teaching of Palestinian literary cartography. The article, in particular, reflects on the development and re-construction of the meanings of students’ subjectivity and nationalism in the light of their virtual performance, responses and imaginary relationship to “place” during the outbreak of Covid-19.

Set in stone: Jesuit martyrdom at land and sea in sixteenth-century Brazil

ABSTRACT Among the many unprecedented challenges that Brazil presented to the Jesuits, perhaps the most surprising was its resistance to making viable martyrs. The two places most likely to provide them a violent death were the sertão (backlands) and the sea. Jesuits in the Portuguese colony wanted adversaries to slay them in odium fidei (in hatred of the faith), a traditional requirement for martyrdom. Yet the Jesuits’ rhetorical construction of Indigenous peoples in the sertão, combined with its complex social dynamics, proved incompatible with this requirement. During the first decades of the province of Brazil, the Soldiers of Christ found that while their evangelical work remained on land, the sea’s narrative tropes suited the requirements for martyrdom best. To build their case for Jesuit martyrs in Brazil, José de Anchieta and his Jesuit companions subverted an age-old poetic landscape and constructed a fluid literary cartography.

The Place of Poetry in Sacrobosco’sSphere: Astronomy and Interpretation

This article explores the connection between astronomy and literature in Johannes Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphera, an introductory astronomy textbook of the thirteenth century. The Tractatus de sphera includes twenty quotations from classical poetry as part of its teaching. Many of these passages enter Sacrobosco’s text knit together with material from commentaries, and the hermeneutical approaches of commentators help determine the role poetry plays in the teaching of astronomy. Two commentaries in particular inform the Tractatus de sphera, whether directly or indirectly: Servius’s commentary on Virgil’s Georgics and Arnulf of Orléans’s commentary on Lucan’s Pharsalia. Each commentary serves Sacrobosco differently. Whereas Servius supplies Sacrobosco with a taxonomy for organizing astronomical phenomena found in poetry, Arnulf engages with issues of astronomical visualization and literary cartography. In both cases, however, Sacrobosco uses poetry in symbiotic relation with commentary. He quotes verse in the context of acts of interpretation. For Sacrobosco, commentary provides a medium where word and world can meet and be reconciled with one another.

Research on Suzhou-Hangzhou Paradigm in Tang Poetry from the Perspective of Literary Cartography

Bai Juyi's poems in Suzhou and Hangzhou represented the turn of Bai Juyi's poetry creation from the outside to the inside. He expressed his daily life deeply in these poems. The research on Bai Juyi's poems and essays in Suzhou and Hangzhou has the following values. The research explored the historical origin and cultural deposits behind every poem of Bai Juyi in Suzhou and Hangzhou. From the perspective of time, the changes of ancient and modern poems reflected the historical changes. From the spatial dimension, the poem map reflected the distribution of relics. The research revealed the connotation and significance of various types of Bai Juyi's poems in Suzhou and Hangzhou. The research also revealed Bai Juyi's interactive writing style, regional connection and historical shuttle. Last but not least, we should sum up the paradigm of Suzhou and Hangzhou in Tang poetry.

DIGITAL FICTION AND READING CARTOGRAPHERS OF URBANITY

The interface between literary fiction and digital technologies is creating new forms of cultural phenomena and enabling new channels of interaction between the text and the reader. This paper deals with locative digital fiction and, more particularly, James Attlee’s 2017 awardwinning work titled The Cartographer’s Confession, produced as a smartphone application. The work is considered within the context of urban communication and the framework of Walter Benjamin’s writings concerning the urban stroller, Robert Tally’s literary cartography, and readerresponse criticism (Wolfgang Iser). The paper addresses the issue of gaps, both cartographic and narrative, and examines the potential of digital fiction to overcome them and thus facilitate communication between the text (as map) and its reader, participant in the process of urban communication.

Cognitive Mapping and Thirdspace in Spatial Literary Pedagogy

Abstract This piece is a reflection on spatiality as critical approach in the classroom. The article focuses on a seminar taught during spring 2019, in which cognitive mapping and thirdspace were used as tools to analyze twentieth-century American literature. Through the elaboration of thirdspace provided by Edward Soja in his seminal work Thirdspace: Journeys through Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places and Fredric Jameson's definition of cognitive mapping found in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, this study offers examples of how literary cartography can be used as a tool in the classroom to reflect on the social and historical conditions that informed specific literary narratives.

Poet as Literary Cartographer: Literary Cartography in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map”

ABSTRACT Scholars tend to focus on Bishop’s sense of place, travel writing, and geographical feelings, yet few scholars examine her role as a literary cartographer. This article explores Bishop’s literary cartography considering her obsession with mapping and exploration. But Bishop also carefully revises the mapmaker’s task to define possibilities for imaginative reversals of cartographic practices. We concentrate on the imaginative logic motivating her implicit contrast between “The Map” and “A Map.”

Cartografierea ca enactivare. Poetica cognitivă și subgenurile narativului: repere teoretice

My study, though concise, problematizes the methodology and some of the conceptual vocabulary of cognitive poetics in relation to the narrative (sub)genre(s). This metatheoretical research attempts to reveal the specific algorithms and concepts of cognitive literary cartography, seen as an enactive process - the interpretation of narrative texts is defined as a dynamic interaction, a mutual transformation of both the `literary mind` and the text. In this respect, concepts such as `figure`, `image schemata`,`scenario` or`cognitive model` are relevant for the attempts to observe and explain the enactive (interpretative) approaches.

A New Paradigm of Home-Mapping for Literary Cartography

A New Paradigm of Home-Mapping for Literary Cartography

Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination

Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination

Their Own Devices: Steampunk Airships as Heterotopias of Crisis and Deviance

Michel Foucault uses a sailing vessel as the exemplar of his theory of heterotopia because of its mobility. The lateral and vertical mobility of the steampunk airship indicates the potential for an even greater exemplar of heterotopia, particularly of Foucault’s defining principles of heterotopic crisis and deviance. These principles are explored onboard the steampunk airships of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy and Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series, resulting in travel towards progressive social frontiers of gender and race. The protagonists of the Leviathan trilogy move from a position of crisis to deviance, as mediated through the friendship and romance of two representatives of warring factions. In contrast, the heroine of the Finishing School series moves from deviance to crisis as she navigates the vagaries of gender and racial identity. These airship heterotopias of young adult fiction, which not only descend geographically but also socially, cross liminal crisis spaces of class, race, gender, and identity to craft literary cartographies for these social frontiers, providing readers with literary maps for their uncertain real worlds of crisis.

Kędy słowo staje się mapą... Refleksje o kartograficzności literatury (część I)

This essay deals with the possibility of translating a literary work into a map. Both literature and cartography are narratives about reality, both can also be treated as modeling systems (in a semiotic sense). The intersection of these two perspectives raises many questions, regarding, i.a. relations between word and image, reality and fiction, space and text. Literature is an artistic discipline, whereas cartography is a scientific one. Therefore, the attempt to harmonize the two heterogeneous narratives – created for completely different reasons – brings fruitful conclusions in the field of literary cartography and also leads to the creation of a common initial methodological framework.

Unnatural Temporalities and Projected Places in Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2

Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2 (1967) belongs to his first period of play writing. In this phase, his works exhibit experimental, remote, impossible narrative/fictional worlds that are overwhelmingly abstract, exhibiting “abrupt shifts of focus and tone” (Wetzsteon 1984, 4). Shepard’s unusual theatrical literary cartography is commensurate with his depiction of unnatural temporalities, in that, although the stage is bare, with almost no props, the postmodernist/metatheatrical conflated timelines and projected (impossible) places in the characters’ imagination mutually reflect and inflect each other. Employing Jan Alber’s reading strategies in his theorization of unnatural narratology and Barbara Piatti’s concept of projected places, this essay proposes a synthetic approach so as to naturalize the unnatural narratives and storyworlds in Shepard’s play.