Teaching Space, Place, and Literature 2017026776, 9781138046979, 9781138047037, 9781315171142

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: the map and the guide
PART I Plotting courses
1 Space odyssey: from place to lived space
2 The nomadic classroom: encountering literary art through affective learning
3 An interdisciplinary pedagogy for a graduate course in spatial studies
4 Mapping multiethnic texts in the literary classroom: GIS and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange
5 Teaching literary cartographies of race, space, place, and displacement
6 “Out of doors”: Shakespeare and the Forest School movement
7 Teaching Victorian literature through cartography
8 Thinking geocritically: teaching Canadian literature in Treaty 6 territory
PART II Representing space and place
9 Panoramic perspectives and city rambles: teaching literary urban studies
10 Modeling interdisciplinarity: spaces of modern Paris through literature and design
11 From ashes to phoenix: a geocritical approach to teaching the literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London
12 Interrogating the urban crisis: teaching Detroit
in literature
13 Place as palimpsest: literary works and cultural-political resistance
14 Space, place, and gender: women and geography in the undergraduate American literature survey
15 “But wither am I wandering?”: gender, class, and writing space in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
PART III Critical domains
16 Space and place in fictional storyworlds
17 Space, movement, and modern literature
18 Literature and the medieval English “borderland”: teaching the culture of identity and place
19 Teaching the importance of space and place: Robert Stepto’s “ritual grounds”
20 Multiple identities and imaginative spatiality in Kipling’s Kim and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
21 Teaching non-places in British children’s fantasy literature
22 Key concepts and the thriller: space, place, and mapping
Index

Citation preview

TEACHING SPACE, PLACE, AND LITERATURE

Teaching Space, Place, and Literature surveys a broad expanse of literary critical, theoretical and historical territories, as it presents both an introduction to teaching spatial literary studies and an essential guide to scholarly research being conducted in this burgeoning field. The transformational effects of postcolonialism, globalization, and the rise of ever more advanced information technologies has helped to push space and spatiality into the foreground, as traditional spatial or geographic limits are erased or redrawn, leading to new ways of seeing space and place in relation to literary studies. Given these developments, the essays in Teaching Space, Place, and Literature represent a timely assertion of the significance of spatiality in literary studies, particularly with respect to the methods, approaches, and theories of teaching literature. This book is divided into three sections, which cover the pragmatic approaches for introducing spatiality studies and literature in the classroom; examinations of particular places or types of space in literature; and broader theoretical, generic, or cultural topics relating to spatial literary studies. Addressing key issues, teaching strategies, urban spaces, race, gender, periods, and genres, this comprehensive volume offers a variety of approaches to teaching space and place in the humanities classroom. Robert T. Tally Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University, where he teaches American and world literature.

TEACHING SPACE, PLACE, AND LITERATURE

Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr.

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Robert T. Tally Jr.; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Robert T. Tally Jr. to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tally, Robert T., Jr., author. Title: Teaching space, place, and literature / Robert T. Tally Jr. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017026776 | ISBN 9781138046979 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138047037 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315171142 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Space and time in literature. | Place (Philosophy) in literature. | Literature—Study and teaching (Higher) | Geographical perception in literature. | Setting (Literature) | Geocriticism. Classification: LCC PN56.S667 T36 2018 | DDC 809/.9332—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026776 ISBN: 978-1-138-04697-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-04703-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-17114-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Ying Fang

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: the map and the guide Robert T. Tally Jr.

x xiv 1

PART I

Plotting courses 1 Space odyssey: from place to lived space Gerhard van den Heever

11 13

2 The nomadic classroom: encountering literary art through affective learning Christian Beck

23

3 An interdisciplinary pedagogy for a graduate course in spatial studies Jordan Hill

31

4 Mapping multiethnic texts in the literary classroom: GIS and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange Anastasia Lin

40

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Contents

5 Teaching literary cartographies of race, space, place, and displacement Jessica Maucione

49

6 “Out of doors”: Shakespeare and the Forest School movement Lynsey McCulloch

58

7 Teaching Victorian literature through cartography Susan E. Cook 8 Thinking geocritically: teaching Canadian literature in Treaty 6 territory Sarah Wylie Krotz

69

77

PART II

Representing space and place 9 Panoramic perspectives and city rambles: teaching literary urban studies Lieven Ameel 10 Modeling interdisciplinarity: spaces of modern Paris through literature and design Andrea Goulet and Eugenie L. Birch 11 From ashes to phoenix: a geocritical approach to teaching the literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London Catharina Löffler

87

89

99

111

12 Interrogating the urban crisis: teaching Detroit in literature Frank D. Rashid

121

13 Place as palimpsest: literary works and cultural-political resistance Andrea Quaid

132

14 Space, place, and gender: women and geography in the undergraduate American literature survey Geneva M. Gano

141

Contents

15 “But wither am I wandering?”: gender, class, and writing space in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Kathryn Walchester

ix

150

PART III

Critical domains

159

16 Space and place in fictional storyworlds Mihai Mindra

161

17 Space, movement, and modern literature Scott Cohen

172

18 Literature and the medieval English “borderland”: teaching the culture of identity and place Ruth Oldman

181

19 Teaching the importance of space and place: Robert Stepto’s “ritual grounds” Wendy Rountree

190

20 Multiple identities and imaginative spatiality in Kipling’s Kim and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Safia Sahli

200

21 Teaching non-places in British children’s fantasy literature Hannah Swamidoss

208

22 Key concepts and the thriller: space, place, and mapping Ralph Crane, Lisa Fletcher, and Elizabeth Leane

219

Index

227

CONTRIBUTORS

Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author

of Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique (2014); Spatiality (2013); Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System (2013); Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (2011); and Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer (2009). Additionally, he has edited several volumes, including The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017); Ecocriticism and Geocriticism (co-edited with Christine M. Battista, 2016); The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said (2015); Literary Cartographies (2014); Kurt Vonnegut: Critical Insights (2013); and Geocritical Explorations (2011). Tally is the general editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies.” Lieven Ameel is University Lecturer of comparative literature at the University

of Tampere, Finland. His research interests include narratives in planning and city experiences in literature. Recent publications include Helsinki in Early TwentiethCentury Literature (2014) and the co-edited volumes Literature and the Peripheral City (2015) and Language, Space and Power (2012). Christian Beck received his Ph.D. in English Literature from Binghamton University. His research focuses on the intersection of the medieval and the contemporary with attention to radical politics. Beck is a lecturer at the University of Central Florida where he teaches courses on cultural studies, activism, and medieval literature. Eugenie L. Birch is the Nussdorg Professor of Urban Research, Co-Director of the

Penn Institute for Urban Research, and Chair of the Graduate Group in City and Regional Planning at the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. She has authored several publications on the history of urban planning and currently serves as Chair of the United Nations’s UN-HABITAT World Urban Campaign.

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Scott Cohen is an associate professor of twentieth-century British and postcolonial

literatures. He teaches courses in Postcolonial cultural studies, world Anglophone literatures, transnational and international modernism, and the history and theory of the novel. Susan E. Cook is an associate professor of English at Southern New Hampshire

University. Her classes include composition and eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century British literature. She has published in Discourse, Dickens Studies Annual, and Pedagogy, among others. Ralph Crane, Lisa Fletcher, and Elizabeth Leane are members of the English program at the University of Tasmania, Australia. They have each published widely in their several fields, which include colonial and postcolonial literatures, popular fiction, island studies, Antarctic studies, and the geohumanities. Crane and Fletcher’s previously co-authored publications include Cave: Nature and Culture, a volume in Reaktion Books’ “Earth” series, which also includes Leane’s South Pole. Geneva M. Gano is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University, where

she teaches courses on women’s writing, modernism, and multiethnic literature. She is completing a manuscript titled “U.S. Modernism at Continent’s End: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos.” Andrea Goulet is Professor and Graduate Chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (Penn, 2006) and Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Space and Science in French Crime Fiction (Penn, 2015). Gerhard van den Heever is a faculty member in the Department of Biblical and

Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa, where he teaches New Testament Studies with a particular interest in Graeco-Roman religions, Christian Origins, and the Pauline letters. Jordan Hill is the Director of the Social Justice Program, a faculty member in the

Master of Humanities/Master of Social Science (MHMSS) Program, and affiliate faculty in the College of Architecture & Planning at the University of Colorado Denver. His research investigates violence and memory in human affairs, and he is the Editorial Director of the peer-reviewed journal the Colorado Critical Review. Sarah Wylie Krotz is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Film

Studies at the University of Alberta. Her articles in the areas of Canadian literature and literary geography can be found in Studies in Canadian Literature, Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, and Canadian Poetry. Her monograph, Mapping with Words: Anglo-Canadian Literary Cartographies, 1789–1916 is forthcoming with University of Toronto Press.

xii

Contributors

Anastasia Lin is an associate professor of English, and she serves as Assistant Vice

President for Research and Engagement at the University of North Georgia. Lin has won several internal grants to develop pedagogical approaches to utilizing GIS in literature classes. Her research interests focus on Asian American literature and literary cartography. Catharina Löffler is a lecturer of English literature at Justus-Liebig-University in

Giessen, Germany. Her main research interests lie in early modern and eighteenthcentury British literature, cultural mobility studies and studies of space. She is the author of Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in 18th Century London (2017). Jessica Maucione is Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender

Studies at Gonzaga University. She specializes in space and place theory and race and ethnic studies. Her publications include articles on space and place theory, Edward P. Jones, Leslie Marmon Silko, Karen Tei Yamashita, Don DeLillo, and John Fante. Lynsey McCulloch is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Coventry University.

Widely published in early modern studies, she is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance and is also undertaking pedagogical research into outdoor learning, more specifically the methodologies attached to Northern European Forest School practice. Mihai Mindra is a professor of American Literature at the University of Bucharest,

Romania. Mindra has been a Brandeis University Fulbright fellow, J.F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies grantee, and is the author of numerous studies on twentieth-century American literature. Ruth Oldman is a PhD student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Andrea Quaid is Co-editor of Acts + Encounters, a collection of works about

experimental writing and community. She teaches in Bard College’s MAT Program (Los Angeles) and Language and Thinking Program (New York). She also teaches at California Institute of the Arts. She is writing a book on contemporary women’s writing and epic. Frank D. Rashid is a professor of English at Marygrove College. Rashid is editor of

the Literary Map of Detroit on the Marygrove Institute for Detroit Studies website. Among his publications are essays on the poetry of Robert Hayden, Lawrence Joseph, and Emily Dickinson; he also writes about Detroit history, politics, and culture. Wendy Rountree is Chair of the Department of Language and Literature and

Professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Her expertise is in

Contributors

xiii

twentieth-century Ethnic American Literature, specializing in African-American Literature, twentieth-century American Literature, and twentieth-century Ethnic American Drama. She has published scholarly articles and books, including Just Us Girls: The Contemporary African-American Young Adult Novel and The Boys Club: Male Protagonists in Contemporary African-American Literature. Safia Sahli is an assistant professor at the English department, ISSHJ, University of

Jendouba, where she teaches graduate and postgraduate level courses on Anglophone literature, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century fiction. Sahli’s research and teaching interests are in literature, cultural studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies. Hannah Swamidoss received a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of

Texas, Dallas, and she currently teaches courses at the college and high school levels. Kathryn Walchester is a lecturer in English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. Her publications include “Our Own Fair Italy”: NineteenthCentury Women Travel Writers and Italy 1800–1844 (Peter Lang, 2007) and Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women in Norway (Anthem, 2014).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their chapters and for their patience, enthusiasm, and commitment to their students and to the profession. I am also grateful to Polly Dodson, Ruth Hilsdon, and Zoe Meyer for their indefatigable editorial support throughout the process. James Hatch provided valuable insight and encouragement at the early stages of this process, and I am thankful for his help. My colleagues at Texas State University have helped to foster a productive working environment, and, as befits a volume on teaching, I am especially grateful to my students, who have helped me in ways too varied and numerous to register in print. While completing this volume, I had the good fortune to be part of a research team in China investigating American literary geographies, and I would like to thank Professor Ying Liu, as well as her students, particularly Yiran, Luyao, and Shuongyang, for their generosity, hospitality, and friendship. I dedicate this book to my friend and colleague Professor Ying Fang, in honor of her own teaching of literature and her insightful research in spatial criticism and theory. I also appreciate the lively contributions of Dusty, Windy, and Steve French. Above all, I want to thank Reiko Graham, who is always there for me.

INTRODUCTION The map and the guide Robert T. Tally Jr.

In his poem titled “Brief Thoughts on Maps,” Miroslav Holub relates the narrative of a Hungarian reconnaissance unit, hopelessly lost in a snowstorm in the Alps during World War I. As the poem acknowledges in its first line, this itself is a retelling of a tale formerly told by Albert Szent-Györgi, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. As the story goes, the Hungarian troops are at the brink of despair; at last, resigning themselves to death, they find a map that one soldier had kept in his pocket. Using it to locate their bearings, the troops manage to make it back safely to camp. There the commanding officer, who had been wracked with anguish and guilt over the loss of his troops, asked to see this miraculous map that had saved their lives. A soldier handed it over, and it was revealed to be a map, not of the Alps, but of the Pyrenees! The moral of the story appears to differ among its tellers. Szent-Györgi’s point in originally recounting the anecdote was to show that, in science, even errors or false starts can lead to success. Holub’s broader intention in retelling the tale, however, may have been to show how, in the words of his poem, “life is on its way somewhere or another,” regardless of one’s sense of orientation.1 The map, even the wrong map, can aid us in getting to where we need to go. Arguably, the study of literature itself serves a similar purpose, as Peter Barry has suggested in English in Practice.2 Literature provides innumerable examples of fictional “maps,” filled with figural representations of real and imaginary places, which can be used by readers to orient themselves in their own lives and lived spaces. The study of literature thus involves a kind of history, theory, and analysis of cartography, figuratively speaking, as scholars may chart the development of literary maps over time, come to understand the various ways in which these maps function in relations to others and to society and culture, and interpret the maps, revealing the significance of this or that feature, making connections between different points, and disclosing the potential meanings of the text as a whole. This consideration of texts as maps is not entirely metaphorical, since poems, plays, narratives, and

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other literary forms have often performed the task of literally depicting real social and geographical spaces, while allowing readers to gain their bearings within the represented landscape. In recent years, especially as a result of what has been referred to as the spatial turn in the humanities, scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to matters of space, place, and mapping in literature. In some cases, this has also included explicitly interdisciplinary research that brings the insights of architecture, art history, geography, urban studies, and other disciplinary fields to bear on literary and cultural studies. In others, the spatial turn has led to distinctive new approaches to literature, including geocriticism, geopoetics, literary geography, and spatially oriented critical theory, all operating more-or-less within the traditional boundaries of the work done in language and literature departments. However these practices are conducted, the enhanced role of space and place in literary studies in the past few decades is noteworthy. The new literary critical, historical, and theoretical approaches associated with the spatial turn have engendered corresponding changes to the ways in which literature is taught and studied. With a heightened sense of awareness of space and place, modern language and literature scholars have helped to develop new readings of familiar texts, to introduce texts and themes previously ignored, and to open up alternative spaces for inquiry in the classroom and beyond. Given these developments, the essays in Teaching Space, Place, and Literature represent a timely assertion of the significance of spatiality in literary studies, particularly with respect to the methods, approaches, and theories of teaching literature. The essays included here exhibit a wide range of pedagogical approaches and strategies for discussing literary spatiality, broadly conceived, while also remaining focused on key elements of space, place, and mapping as they engage with various texts, courses, teaching strategies, and theoretical models. The aim of Teaching Space, Place, and Literature is to introduce scholars and teachers to the manifold ways in which the spatial turn in the humanities can inform their teaching of literature. This volume also suggests new ways of reading which highlight the spatiality of the texts in question, whether that be understood as the spaces within the text or as the relations between literary representation and the “real world” spaces and places outside the text. These essays introduce and explore various methods, including those of geocriticism, literary geography, or technology-based approaches (such as those employing Geographical Information Systems), which can be used in the university classroom or in student writing to help disclose the significance of spatial relations, location, landscape, geography, and other related matters in literature. In short, the essays in this volume attest to the range of possibilities for teaching and learning made available by recent work in spatial literary studies, and the book as a whole can serve as a sort of guide for exploring different ways of seeing space, place, and literature in the university classroom, in local communities, and elsewhere in the world. The spatial turn in the humanities deserves a word of explanation, particularly since one could argue that, in a manner of speaking, literary studies have always included a large number of spatial concepts or concerns.3 Geography, for

Introduction: the map and the guide

3

example, has never been too distant from literature, and the very categories by which literary studies have been organized are not infrequently geographical or spatial. National languages and literatures, of course, imply such geographical and political constructions as nation-states, territories, realms, or domains, with attendant borders, transgressions, contact zones, and so forth. Regionalism offers another clearly geographical category for literary studies, as do courses organized around geographical features, such as maritime writing, travel narratives, urban literature, and so on. Additionally, many traditional genres or movements are associated with the places or types of space that characterize their subjects, such as the rolling hills of pastoral poetry, the urban exposé in detective fiction, the distinctive landscapes of the western, the science-fictional societies of utopian literature, or the alternative worlds of fantasy. Even within the forms of the texts themselves, critics have long paid attention to spatial structure in poems, for instance, or to the ways in which epics or novels represent places, or to the spatial arrangement of sets and characters in a play. In many respects, critical attention to spatiality or to matters of space, place, and mapping in literary studies is nothing new, and students of literature have long viewed space and place as crucial elements of their work. However, the spatial turn in recent years has disclosed a certain new spatiality associated with the present, and spatially oriented critics have convincingly argued that many earlier methods of literary analysis, even those that examined spatial or geographical features of the texts under consideration, tended to downplay or overlook the significance of space and place, sometimes subordinating space to time, geography to history, or the setting to the characters inhabiting the space and the events taking place there. Space was conceived largely as “an empty container,” a “mere backdrop for time,” in which the events unfold progressively, subject to the teleological sense of progress, as Bertrand Westphal has put it.4 According to this view, time and history were the dominant categories, where space or geography merely designated those areas in which important events occurred. As Michel Foucault observed, with respect to philosophy and the human sciences, The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. [. . .] The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.5 The shift in focus that Foucault sees as typical of late-twentieth-century thought has been observed by others as well, from geographers and historians to visual artists and creative writers. In recent literary and cultural studies, notably with the advent of the discourses of postmodernism, postcolonial theory, and globalization, but also

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with respect to other interdisciplinary approaches to literature, space has reemerged as a principal concern.6 The spatial turn was accelerated by a new aesthetic sensibility that came to be understood as postmodernism in the arts, architecture, literature, and philosophy, combined with a strong theoretical critique provided by poststructuralism. Fredric Jameson has famously identified a “new spatiality implicit in the postmodern,” which comports with Foucault’s sense that ours is “the epoch of space.”7 Jameson called for a project of “cognitive mapping” as the most suitable response to the bewildering novelty and velocity of postmodern culture. Geographers such as David Harvey, Edward W. Soja, Derek Gregory, and Nigel Thrift have demonstrated how the postmodern condition has occasioned a “reassertion of space” in critical theory, particularly with respect to urban studies.8 In postcolonial studies, critics such as Edward W. Said have proposed a “geographical inquiry into historical experience” in which careful attention must be paid to spatial experience.9 The transformational effects of postcolonialism, globalization, and the rise of ever more advanced information technologies helped to push space and spatiality into the foreground, as traditional spatial or geographic limits were erased or redrawn.10 At the same time, the work of ecocritics or environmentalists have called attention to serious concerns over the development and management of natural and social spaces, particularly emphasizing problems with preservation, sustainability, and ecological disaster.11 The sense that recent history, if not the present moment, calls for a greater awareness of the importance of space in culture and society seems to be reaffirmed as the twenty-first century’s natural and geopolitical order, what has been celebrated or criticized as a “borderless world” in an era of globalization, brings issues of spatiality to the fore.12 Although late modernity or postmodernity might be characterized by a heightened awareness of spatiality, it is not really accurate to identify this reassertion of space in literary or cultural studies as an exclusively modern or postmodern phenomenon. Scholars working with ancient, medieval, renaissance texts, among others, have contributed invaluable research into the ways that spatially oriented criticism can enable significant new readings of texts and contexts.13 Today, spatial literary studies – whether conceived of as geocriticism, literary geography, or the spatial humanities more generally – offers an approach to literary and cultural texts, ranging across periods and genres, that emphasizes the relations between space and writing. All of this work contributes to the formation of new critical perspectives which seems particularly timely today. As noted above, spatial or geographical considerations have no doubt always been a part of literary and critical practice, but the effects of the recent resurgence of spatiality and the explosion in the number of spatially oriented works of criticism and scholarship cannot be underestimated. The spatial turn has no particular date of inception, but one may perceive more and more critical attention being paid to matters of space in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet sometimes transformative concepts, approaches, or theories only become noticeable after the turn, as it were. For example, a significant collection of essays published in 1990 and designed to register the field-altering changes to literary studies in the aftermath of “theory,” Frank

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Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study, contained no entries for space, place, mapping, or geography.14 Raymond Williams’s enormously influential Keywords, which first appeared in 1975, also contained no entry for space or place; the second edition, published in 1983, included 21 additional entries, but space and place remained absent.15 Harvey felt the need to redress this omission in an essay titled “Space as a Key Word,” which began by stating that “If Raymond Williams were contemplating the entries for his celebrated text on Keywords today, he would have surely have included the word ‘space’.”16 In a 2006 essay with the deceptively simple, keyword-like title of “Space,” Thrift dates the “spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences” to roughly the span of “the last 20 years or so,” and he predicts that the relatively recent critical phenomenon will have lasting results on how we think about ourselves and the world.17 Understandably, the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has begun to affect the ways in which literature and culture are taught. Recently, a number of courses in spatial literary criticism and theory have appeared in university curricula, and far more courses using geocritical or spatial approaches to existing fields have emerged. Examples include classes on spatiality in medieval literature, postcolonial geographies, representations of the city in literature, feminist spaces, regional writing, travel narrative, and studies on individual authors and their environments. In some cases, technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or Google Maps have been used to examine texts in new and exciting ways; for instance, students might map out the trajectory of an itinerant character, look up the physical geography of a characteristic setting, or contrast scenes of a novel through an examination of the different places on a map. Examinations of exemplary types of space, such as urban versus pastoral, have a long history in literary studies, and such classics as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City can be viewed as an important precursor to current geocritical practices.18 The enhanced attention to space, place, or geography in literary studies makes possible innovative approaches to traditional literary criticism, while also enabling students to make connections between textual interpretation and scholarly practices in other disciplines. Spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, thus highlight the relations between texts and the world represented in them, offering students new ways of seeing literature, literary history, and criticism. I expect that the range of spatial literary studies will continue to expand, to increase in complexity and nuance, and to chart new directions for further inquiry in the future. Whether considered as a singular subfield within literary scholarship more generally or as diverse examples of multiple critical practices, spatial approaches to literature have exploded in recent years, and the number of books and essays that might be legitimately listed on any comprehensive bibliography of spatial literary studies is almost beyond count.19 Given the diversity of critical practices, as is evident in the many different approaches on display in Teaching Space, Place, and Literature, it is probably worth asking what constitutes spatial literary studies, even if one must admit up front that such a discussion could never be complete or that such a definition could scarcely be definitive, at least not in a way that all

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practitioners would readily agree upon. For my own part, especially in my role as an editor, I have tried to err on the side of expansiveness and inclusiveness. That is, I consider spatial literary studies, doing business as geocriticism, literary geography, the spatial humanities, or using some other label, as a multiform critical practice that would include almost any approach to the text that focuses attention on space, place, or mapping, whether within the confines of the text, in reference to the outside world, or some combination of the two, as in Soja’s suggestive notion of “real-andimagined places.”20 The real, imagined, and real-and-imagined spaces of literature, criticism, history, and theory, as well as of our own abstract conceptions and lived experience, all constitute the practical domain for spatial literary studies. Similarly, in my use of the term geocriticism, I have tried to indicate something like a general comportment toward the text, rather than a discrete methodology with its own set of rules and conventions. It is a critical practice associated with the sort of topophrenia or “placemindedness” that, I maintain, influences the relations among individual and collective subjects and the spaces and places of their world. Prior to discovering Bertrand Westphal’s distinctive method of géocritique in the 2000s, I first began employing the term in order to give a sense of the reader’s work in examining the “maps” created by a writer’s literary cartography. That is, if a writer, through the act of writing, produces maps of the social spaces represented in the text, the geocritical reader, sensitive to the text’s spatiality and its inherently cartographic project, is able to read these maps. Geocriticism, to my mind, represents a critical counterpart to the aesthetic production of literary cartography. For others, perhaps, the practices associated with what are variously called geocriticism, literary cartography, or literary geography understandably entail something much more specific, such as focusing on a single recognizable topos, making the connection to a geographic body of knowledge exterior to the text under consideration, or bringing new technologies such as GIS to bear on literary scholarship. But I have found that a looser definition serves to unite disparate critical practices under a meaningful, if also contested, changing, and maybe even aleatory, sign. Geocriticism, like the more general spatial literary studies, makes possible any number of interpretive, analytical approaches to textual geographies, themselves conceived broadly enough to include the real and imagined spaces of literature, which in turn reflect, shape, and transform the real and imagined spaces and places of the world. The wide range of critical approaches currently being taken by a diverse array of scholars working in the spatial humanities reflects the richness and diversity of the field itself, and this diversity may be seen in the varied approaches undertaken and advocated by the contributors to Teaching Space, Place, and Literature. Not all approaches may be equally effective in all situations, but each appears to have value. Just as some of the characteristic demarcations among different sorts of spatial literary studies may not ultimately hold, as certain distinctive approaches blend with others or as what had seemed clear boundaries between them suddenly shift or blur, so too the ostensible categorical divisions must be viewed as artificial, provisional, and even, if the reader does not find them especially helpful, disposable. For instance, one may speak of places represented in the text or of texts circulating in spaces, but

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the distinction quickly becomes untenable, as it is clear that the relations between the text and the place, “between the paper and the stone,” as Westphal referred to it, are thoroughly bound up in each other.21 Similarly, the old rivalry between theory and practice cannot long maintain its mutual opposition, as even the most metatheoretical essays must find their substance in literary critical practices, even as the most traditional close readings cannot function without an operative theoretical framework. And so on. But the complexity or fluidity of categories is no reason to abandon them. If they must be perceived as tentative and heuristic, as labels whose value obtains only while needed, like the scaffolding that may be judiciously put away and forgotten when the edifice is completed, or, better, like the ladder one may choose to use or to ignore, depending on one’s climbing strategy. Teaching Space, Place, and Literature aims to survey a broad expanse of literary critical, theoretical, historical territories, as it presents both an introduction to teaching spatial literary studies and an essential guide to scholarly research being conducted in this burgeoning field. This collection provides a fairly representative sample of work being done by spatially oriented critics and teachers across a range of periods, languages, and literatures, while focusing attention on the ways that space, place, and mapping are used in the college classroom and curriculum. Drawing upon the resources of spatiality studies and comparative literature, this collection of essays explores the different means by which authors use both strictly mimetic and more fantastic means to figure forth what Soja has called the “real-and-imagined” spaces of their respective worlds. This volume also introduces novel ways of teaching texts in relation to spatial and geographical frameworks. Examining an array of texts and spaces from an international, comparative literary perspective, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how literature – along with the teaching of literature – represents, shapes, and interprets the shifting spaces of the world and our experience of them. Teaching Space, Place, and Literature is organized into three parts, and although the essays within each part and throughout the volume can be read independently of the others, in any order or irrespective of their placement within a given section, the overall trajectory of the volume is intended to cover a range of possible concepts, strategies, topics, places, and issues. Generally speaking, the subjects of these essays move from the pragmatic approaches for introducing spatiality studies and literature in the particular classroom to examinations of particular places or types of space in literature, then to broader theoretical, generic, or cultural topics’ relations to spatial literary studies. But the themes of the essays and of the parts also overlap, as the discrete examples often reveal the significance of the more abstract ideas, while the key concepts aid in guiding the reader through the details of various texts, courses, sites, and approaches. Just as a map can provide a clarifying overview of the space it purports to represent, it must also include sufficient detail to make sense of that space. Along those lines, this volume functions as a sort of map or, perhaps, an atlas – a collection of maps – or guidebook in which the various approaches to teaching space, place, and literature find their representation forms in narrative or description.

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Robert T. Tally Jr.

The essays in this volume reflect the wide variety of ways in which space, place, and literature are being addressed in college and university classrooms today. Part I contains essays that address key concepts and issues raised in spatial literary studies that students will likely grapple with as they gain greater familiarity with the terminology, conceptual framework, and range of questions arising from the subject matter. The contributors offer examples from their own courses, classrooms, and pedagogical techniques, demonstrating the ways that an enhanced attention to place, spatiality, and spatial relations affect the teaching of literature. Part II focuses on various approaches to bringing space and place into view in the classroom. In some cases, this might involve a certain type of space (e.g., the urban environment) or a specific place (such as Detroit); in others, place becomes a site in which other issues, such as gender or race, might be explored in productive exchanges. In Part III, the essays range across a number of critical domains, focusing on various genres and periods of literature while also investigating the degree to which spatial constructions help to shape the meanings of literary texts. Using as examples texts from the eighteenth century to the present and from different parts of the globe, these chapters introduce new ways of seeing space and place in literary studies. Overall, Teaching Space, Place, and Literature makes visible the vast range of concepts, theories, strategies, methods, and resources available to teachers interested in exploring the relationships among space, place, mapping, and literature in a wide variety of courses and settings. As a result of this renewed focus on spatiality, professors may discover innovative techniques or technologies for use in the classroom, new ways of reading a given text or set of texts, and different approaches to the social, political, or cultural contexts of the subject matter. By rethinking the ways in which literature courses are oriented, we necessarily reorient ourselves and our students, exploring new territories and discovering new vistas. The study of literary spaces inevitably requires the invention and reinvention of evermore imaginative cartographies. Indeed, even if the maps we create or consult turn out to be maps of the Pyrenees while we had thought to be exploring the Alps, we may still find our way home, but we will likely do so after having had many extraordinary, transformative experiences along the way.

Notes 1 Miroslav Holub, “Brief Thoughts on Maps,” trans. Jarmila and Ian Milner, Times Literary Supplement (February 4, 1977): 118. 2 Peter Barry, English in Practice: In Pursuit of English Studies, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 3. 3 See, e.g., Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2008). 4 Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 10. 5 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986), 22. 6 See Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); on the ways in which this new spatiality has influenced literature in particular, see Peta Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction (London: Routledge, 2007).

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7 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 418. 8 See, e.g., David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 9 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 7. 10 See, e.g., Jane Stadler, Peta Mitchell, and Stephen Carleton, Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). 11 See, e.g., Christine M. Battista and Robert T. Tally Jr., eds., Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 12 See Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); needless to say, perhaps, this term has become increasingly problematic in the years since Ohmae first introduced it. 13 Arguably, research in medieval or early modern cultures has proven as influential upon the spatial humanities as that in any field, with a number of influential studies setting the tone. See, e.g., Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1993). 14 Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 15 Raymond Williams, Keywords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also the Keywords Project (http://keywords.pitt.edu), a collaborative, revisionary extension of Williams’s endeavor to create a lexicon for contemporary cultural studies currently underway at the University of Pittsburgh. 16 David Harvey, “Space as a Keyword,” in Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 119. 17 Nigel Thrift, “Space,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23, no. 2–3 (2006): 139. 18 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 19 Although a truly comprehensive list is probably impossible, the editors of a new journal, Literary Geographies, have compiled and regularly augment an impressive bibliography of relevant scholarship. The bibliography is available online at http://literarygeographies. wordpress.com/. 20 See Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 21 Westphal, Geocriticism, 158.

PART I

Plotting courses

1 SPACE ODYSSEY From place to lived space Gerhard van den Heever

Introducing a journey through space: a report on teaching It is with some justification that an exposition on course design on the topic of space should start with the term “introduce,” since intro (into) and ducere (to lead) imply a collective movement – in this case – into space, the condition of being spaced (i.e., spatiality), and the idea of a journey as an ekstasis, a transgression of boundaries. Spatiality, space, and odyssey – the three terms thus not only evoke senses of placement but also movement, such that movement implies changed positionalities with all the attendant implications for how the Real manifests and becomes the theatre for the unfolding of being-in-context or existence-in-context. It is this double sense of simultaneously being in place and coming to place that is the underlying conception to this particular course design that was called “Space Odyssey,” that is, teaching a spatial odyssey is deliberately constructivist. Thus, human being-in-context or existence-in-context is also culture in the sense of cultivate (Latin: colere, cultura, to make grow) so that being-spaced is not an unmediated condition imposed on human existence but arises from the very world-constructing that is human existence. It is probably trite to state the obvious, namely that the course takes its title from the iconic 1968 film co-written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, The Sentinel (Clarke co-wrote the film script), which on the surface dealt with travel into deep space (to the moon and to the planet Jupiter) but also reflected on matters relating to human interaction with the surrounding world – artificial intelligence, technology, evolution, and existentialism as approach to existence. As the philosopher and theoretician of architecture, Karsten Harries, explained, the film spoke about (outer) space on two levels: the domain of transcendence, the longing for the ecstatic, the sublime as the encounter with a totally other, the numinous as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans;

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but also as the desire for the experience of the beautiful, of being at home.1 As such, it is not only a story about transgression of physical boundaries but also a transgression of conceptual boundaries. Hence the evocation of this film in the title of the course as an indication of transgression of disciplinary boundaries in the pursuit and operationalizing of a trans-disciplinary study of spatiality. As film – and as narrative – 2001: A Space Odyssey illuminates an aspect of thinking space and spatiality in the context of architecture (“the art of constructing space” from archi – chief – and tekton – builder, i.e., the person responsible for the intentional planning of the construction of space) that moves beyond the formalist, aesthetic, and technical, into language and signification as the ground from which spacemaking in architecture “takes place.”2 From these conceptual grounds and origins, “Space Odyssey” was a somewhat anomalous course taught in the context of a program in architecture in that it was designed not to focus on architecture as technical art, but as cultural work, more specifically architecture as a set of practices in the context of cultural discourses and philosophies of representation which will also highlight the socio-cultural politicality of the spacemaking endeavor.3 That architecture is also cultural work – and therefore at home in cultural discourses – is more than adequately illustrated in the monograph of Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture, on the way in which philosophy and cultural theory intersects with architectural theory and practice.4

Spatiality: the event of being-space The thinking of space and spatializing starts not with a set of fixed ideational orientation points (or fixed and static theoretical perspectives) that encapsulate the “truth/s” of space but with creative movement, which movement is best expressed in the gerund of spatializing, theorizing, conceptualizing, all indicating the processual nature of the constructing taking place (hence “event of being-space”). The positing of space and spatiality as a core feature of human cogitation of the world – and its embodiment in the human and social sciences since the middle of the 20th century in the rise of the intellectual movement known as the New Left – is an epiphenomenon of that groundswell of political reorientation defined by the multiple and varied reception history of Marxist-materialist thinking. The “Marxist” and “materialist turn” in human and social studies in the roughly 150-year-long reception history of materialist approaches to history, society, and culture, in its turn engendered a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion that, in this context, can be typified as the effects of the localized – emplaced, contextualized – spatiality on knowledge production, a theoretical stance that has since inflected many human and social science disciplines. If the title of the project, “Space Odyssey,” signaled transgression of boundaries, it is fitting to start any theoretical conceptualization of space and spatiality with reflection on the very process of thinking space in a transgressional manner, the making of a field of study that does not confine itself to narrow boundaries, that does not adhere to disciplinary limitations. Thus, this was meant as an exploration of the field of spatiality studies in its widest reaches and range: thinking the formation of a trans-discipline.

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By general consent, the originary moment when the significance of thinking space was forcefully enunciated as program for the human sciences, is the 1967 lecture by Michel Foucault “Des Espaces Autres,” published in English in 1986 as “Of Other Spaces.”5 The lecture opens with the statement that “[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.”6 In contrast to the 19th century with its “obsession with history” as linear development and “ever-accumulating past” the present epoch is the epoch of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, intersections, of elements connected in an ensemble of relations in which they mutually implicate each other – the world as configuration. This not only set in train a new way of understanding the world but also a new way of understanding space. If a new conception of space and spatiality arises under specific historical conditions, then space can be thought of as a social construct. This brought about a shift in the human sciences to the so-called “spatial turn.” In contrast to older debates on the nature of space, the new post-structuralist conception of space is one of relationship and the event of relationing: “Conversely, socially constructed, poststructuralist notions of space entail the metaphor of networks, such as the internet, which are forever partial, incomplete, and never fully known.”7 In the context of the spatial turn described by Wharf and Arias, space assumes the character of constitutive relationing. The spatial turn implies conceiving space as a social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena. Understanding space and spatiality – where things happen – is essential for understanding why and how things happen. When conceived of as events of relationing, space and spatiality serve not only as connectors of elements in fields of meaning, space also serves as junction or connector of frameworks for the understanding of connected elements – in fact, the very fact of networks of connections demands networks of perspectives. Therefore, spatial thinking operates in a broad range of disciplines. When space is theorized, as for instance, in the entry for “space/spatiality” in the New Oxford Companion to Law, scholars draw from a range of theoretical sources, including queer theory, urban political economy, actor-network theory, and cultural studies – spatiality discourse is essentially inter- and transdisciplinary in character.8 Inversely, space and spatiality inflects a range of disciplines from cultural sociology, human geography, urban studies/urban planning, cultural geography, biblical studies and religious studies, literature studies, and critical spatiality theory. The example from the intersection of space and law is instructive: if law is the collective noun for the rules of cohabitation, the foundation of all social life, then space circumscribes the constitutive complex of formations that give rise to the social – “law and space are both socially produced and socially productive.”9 Spatiality is socially produced space. Scholars of spatiality reject the Kantian division between space and society. Spatiality is not simply an outcome of social forces but is itself constitutive of society and politics. Such arguments challenge the modernist tendency to treat time and history as the privileged vector of enquiry, the effect of which was to treat space as inert or passive.

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Intellection and cognitional culturing are cultural practices even as are the “products” of such intellection – what we know and how we come to know it (and know that we know it) are human constructs. As the entry for spatiality states in The Dictionary of Geography, spatiality is [t]he effect of space on actions, interactions, entities, and theories. “Spatiality is a social construct, not an exogenously given, absolute coordinate system . . . but a product of the political economic system.”10 “Spatiality is constitutive of the particular ways in which the different modalities of power take effect. The two major dimensions of spatiality are reach and intensity.”11 “From the perspective of spatiality, space and society do not gaze at each other but rather are mutually embedded.”12 The term is also used as a synonym for distribution, or spatial expression.13

Space – social space: the spatiality of being human The idea that space is constitutive relationing and a fundamental constitutive part of the construction of the social, is forcefully expressed in two seminal essays (and the “spatial metaphors” they center on) by the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. The two essays are “Bauen Wohnen Denken” and “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” and the two metaphors occurring as central to the argument are that of the bridge and the Greek temple.14 With the bridge metaphor Heidegger turns the idea of space away from spatium and extensio, the technical, the measurable, to that which relates, binds together. The Greek temple in Heidegger’s metaphor is the event of the manifestation of the Fourfold, the manifestation of the mutual calling forth of gods and humans, sky and earth as Er-eignis, both as event and as claim. Bauen/building as wohnen/dwelling implicates the historical instantiation of the play of Being and world, Being understood as the worlding of world/welten der Welt. As worlding, Being emerges in a Bewandtnisganzheit, a network of meaning-generating relations. Space in Heideggerian understanding does not evoke material quality but rather functions as a relational concept – how things relate and mutually let each emerge into unconcealedness (from the Greek alētheia, truth, lit. wrought from forgottenness) in order to stand in the light of truth as what they are. The open space where this “revelation” takes place is the open clearing of language, hence the essential linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) of Being. Thus, at the core of the Being-event are acts of representation (ranging from artworks as objects, through speech to literature, conceived in the widest possible sense). Language as shared truth-revealing is the foundation of Mitsein, being-together, since Being is not something – an object – that humans possess; rather the truth of Being and beings emerge in the course of human history as the discoursed emplaced unfolding of the understanding-reception of the truth of Being and beings, in the culture-making of humans constructing their world. The social produces space, and in its effect-ness it highlights the interaction between space and human action. Spatiality denotes the idea that rather than space being a backdrop to social life, it is constitutive of social life. Spatiality as relationality is a function of Being and Mitsein.

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In his doctoral dissertation, “Die verskynsel woon: ’n wysgerig-antropologiese studie,”15 Frederik J. Engelbrecht combines these Heideggerian insights with the work of the Dutch psychiatrist, Jan Hendrik van den Berg, who with his concept of metabletica (lit. the doctrine of changes) demonstrates how reality (Being itself) changes across historical epochs, which changes manifest in representations of new conceptions of being human, new understandings of the world, as well as new ways of human comportment with culture and society.16 Engelbrecht appropriates van den Berg’s work in order to show how very ordinary spaces and spatial domains (e.g., threshold, dwelling: a new inside and new spirituality) are not only constructed in acts of representation, but as cultured also retro-construct spatialized ways of experiencing the world and making social worlds.

The spatial imagining of worlds After maintaining that space is socially constructed and a cultural “artifact,” the question remains how spatiality as relationality comes to be constituted. At stake is the embodied locationing and locatedness that produce an affectively-laden comportment with space. In this process, representation and narrative are two of the most important domains where the construction of valorized space takes place. Two very different examples deriving from widely different contexts and historical epochs illustrate the process. The first is Homer’s The Odyssey, the ninth century b.c.e. Greek epic that recounts that the ten-year-long return of Odysseus to his home in Ithaka from the Trojan War. In the process Odysseus’s adventures take in the whole of the Greek islands in the Ionian Sea (between Greece and Turkey; Homer wrote the epic in Ionia, what is now western Turkey), Crete, the mainland Peloponnese up to the island of Ithaka lying off the west coast of mainland Greece. Amongst other things, The Odyssey is a storied geographical account of Greek places – it weaves together a network of geographic references to places, and the mythic traditions rooted in them, which together define Greek identity. Added to that the fact that the Homeric epic is also evidence for the new reordering of the Greek pantheon. Between the time of the historical Trojan War (ca. 1150 b.c.e.) and the writing of the Homeric epics (ca. 850 b.c.e.) fundamental shifts took place in Greek religion: in short, the pantheon of gods was reconstituted (Jupiter replaced Chronos as head of the divine household and pantheon). Scholars of religious history agree that Homer’s epic expressed on the narrative level the fundamental changes that took place in Greek self-definition, identity, and religion. In effect, by recounting Odysseus’s travels and adventures, Homer constructed the Greek world of his time. The way the epic works is to delineate geographical and spatial contours “in such ways as to convey pertinent cultural meanings, while also staging diverse scenarios of intercultural contact,” that is, the Homeric epic literally makes possible intersocial and intercultural interaction through a process called geopoetics. As Skempis and Ziogas puts it: “Every story has its place(s). As narrative genre par excellence, epic is concerned with representing spatial dimensions.”17 At the other end of the phenomenon, literary cartographies illuminate how we come to “see” a place as a result of its representation together with the possibilities of action built into the representation, which lays the groundwork for

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understanding ourselves in context as well as imagining possible avenues for social agency.18 In fact, the practice of literary cartography highlights the social identity activist-possibilities of literature immersed in their context. While this aspect of literary cartographies has been written about extensively, and given the context in which this course was taught, the second example is drawn from the discipline of landscape architecture. The landscape architect, Johan Prinsloo, argued in various publications for the bi-directional flow of influence in the imagining, and construction, of a physical landscape and an imagined affectively-laden world: Texts have historically played a part in the cultivation of people’s creative perceptions of landscapes: Virgil’s Georgics helped “cultivate a shared Roman identity” located in rustic fields; the Medieval Roman de la Rose cultivated the idea of an enclosed garden as a setting for love; the Koran cultivates the idea of an enclosed garden as paradise; Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mt. Ventoux initiated the Renaissance appreciation for mere nature; also during the Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia poliphili described a series of landscapes, freely built from the remains of and longing for Antiquity, which were directly translated to designed places (such as parts of Versailles); many Romantic poets, like Wordsworth, together with painters (like Lorraine inspired by Virgil), cultivated the British love for the sublime and “free” nature of their native green hills.19 It is this aspect of text-creating-physical environments that Prinsloo indicates by the term, topo-text. The term indicates how the physical arrangement of space, and the consequent experience of space, interweaves with practices of representation that conceptually construct the space and the habitus, or habituated actions, that pertain to being emplaced in these spaces. To adapt an insight from Kanishka Goonewardena, the aesthetics of space, or the affectively ladenness of space that constructs programs of action, is the imperceptible ideology that steers the politicality of existing-in-conceived-space.20 The insight that spaces are simultaneously concrete, yet imagined, and spaces for the operationalization of politics is primarily connected to the work of Henri Lefebvre.21 The terms Lefebvre employed to indicate this multileveledness of space, are spatial practices (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space), and representational spaces (lived space) – the three terms being sides of the same coin, indicating interweaving aspects of the conception and function of space and spacemaking.22 It is exactly space-as-imagined, which imagination occurs through thick sets (and histories) of portrayals of space, aesthetic interpretations of space(s), that create the space for social action and consciousness of particular kinds of spaces. The diachronic layeredness of space, where meanings leave traces on space and interpretations of spaces – each layer adding to the nuances speaking through each other in the continued making of spaces into what they are – is well described in the work of Jon Anderson on cultural geography.23 Such experience of space as theatre for action requires an embodied spatiality, the quality of an affectively

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charged emplacement in interpreted space. To speak with Michel de Certeau, this is the operation of the flaneur, the person who moves through the city as an explorer-observer and social participant, whose actions not only imprint on the making of interpreted space, but also are steered in manners set up by the physical arrangements of spaces that themselves bear the imprint of earlier interpretations of space: “Space is a practiced place.”24 In this chapter, “Spatial Stories,” de Certeau analyses the role of space and spatializing by means of storying in constructing the persuasions and inducements that motivate everyday (and not so everyday) actions. Storying provides orientation, situation, and temporalization to the making of space. Through storying place (what appears to be the stable emplacement of fixed objects in fixed spatial arrangements vis-à-vis each other) is infused with affect, with value, so much that space is the intersection of “conflictual programs” and “contractual proximities.” Stories place objects in landscapes and temporalize them or insert them into history, and conversely create history through creating spatial and temporal relationships between objects. By changing places into spaces, stories organize the relationship between places and spaces, and in this manner, stories and narratives direct action.25

Space: place, not in place, no place – atopia, utopia, and authentic spaces A final question hovers around the implications of the phrase “imagined space” or “space-as-imagined.” If space is a relationality that constructs Being and beings, and arises from sets of representations, then this raises the question about authentic spaces. What is an authentic space? If narrations and representations of space create new senses of space, themselves arising through the metaphorical fog of traces of earlier interpretations and imaginings of space, how is spatiality to be judged as authentic? And authentic with reference to what? In the history of architecture and the built environment, conceptions of identity and evocations (and appropriation) of historical epochs have literally been built into the physical environment, such that, for instance, the rediscovery of Greek and Roman imperial building styles and ornament occurs at that moment in European cultural history when Europe projected its imperial presence into the rest of the world, since the late 18th century but particularly during the 19th century (e.g., the political significance of neoclassicism as cultural and architectural style). On the level of popular culture, the many “faux”-styles, like faux-provençal and faux-tuscan signify more than just appropriation and re-use of historical symbolisms, but rather an imagination of space and spatiality as an arrangement of lived spaces floating in a kind of rootlessness out of the here and now. Hence, the ironic circumstance of atopical spatiality, or as implied by the etymology, utopia as nowhere (from the Greek: ou = no, topos = place). An extreme example of this nowhereness is the many imaginations of the Holy Land in contemporary popular culture, particularly in American culture since the 19th century.26 In more recent times this kind of atopia is exemplified by the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida, USA.27 Here, among a concentration of

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remodeled places, buildings, and scenes from the life of Jesus and the Gospel narratives, the events of the narrated life of Jesus are acted out: from typical market scenes (there is a Fast Snack selling foot-long hotdogs; an Esther’s Banquet Hall selling “delicious entrées and gourmet desserts”; a Church of All Nations Bistro; stalls selling jewelry and other souvenirs) to performance spaces where biblical scenes are enacted: the upper room for the Last Supper and Calvary, complete with crucifixion. Participation in the Last Supper is offered as spiritual experience par excellence as if you enter into and participate in the original event itself, as something life-changing. While there is much to comment on from the perspective of popular culture, it is precisely the attempted accurate reconstruction of a historical event and historical space that evokes the question of what an authentic experience and an authentic space is. To put it perhaps daringly, the Holy Land Experience – and this goes for all popularly appropriated historical cultural styles and symbolisms – is authentic to the degree that it represents an imagined space that is both shaped by contemporary narratives-as-mythology and then in its own turns continues to shape and reinforce an experience of American space that has itself assumed the character of a holy land of an American Christianity that projects itself outward as a hegemonic political and cultural force. Following the “Odyssey” in this manner traverses a number of disciplinary boundaries to consider issues of power, the political, the art of representation in constructing space, the embodied placement in space in order to practice space as concrete place – it is to pursue thinking space in its broadest reaches of cultural studies. This was the purpose of the course in Space Odyssey.

Notes 1 Karsten Harries, “The Ethical Significance of Environmental Beauty,” in Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place, ed. Gregory Caicco (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2007), 137. 2 See for instance Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 3 The course was taught as a semester course in the honors program in architecture at the University of Pretoria, South Africa over three years from 2014 to 2016, each year designated in the course title: “2014, A Space Odyssey”; “2015, A Space Odyssey.” The 2016 presentation was called “Geographies of Real-and-Imagined Spaces.” 4 Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York; London: Routledge, 1996). From the Preface: “The discipline of architecture has gone through something of a metamorphosis in recent years. There is evidence of a clear shift both in the nature of debates within architecture and in its relationship with other academic disciplines. Not only are architects and architectural theorists becoming more and more receptive to the whole domain of cultural theory, but cultural theorists, philosophers, sociologists and many others are now to be found increasingly engaged with questions of architecture and the built environment” (my emphasis). The philosophers and cultural theorists are arranged according to theoretical framework: Modernism, Phenomenology, Structuralism, Postmodernism, and Poststructuralism. 5 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. 6 Ibid., 22.

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7 Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Routledge Studies in Human Geography (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 22; the citation is from their introduction to the volume: “Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” 8 Nicholas Blomley, “Space/Spatiality,” in The New Oxford Companion to Law, eds. Peter Cane and Joanne Conaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press), accessed June 17, 2013, www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100520899. 9 Ibid. 10 Eric Sheppard, “The Spatiality of The Limits to Capital,” Antipode 36, no. 3 (2004): 470–479, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2004.00426.x. 11 Stuart Clegg, “Review of John Allen, Lost Geographies of Power,” Area 38, no. 1 (2006): 113–114. 12 Nancy Ettlinger and Fernando Bosco, “Thinking Through Networks and Their Spatiality: A Critique of the US (Public) War on Terrorism and Its Geographic Discourse,” Antipode 36, no. 2 (2004): 249–271, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2004.00405.x. 13 Susan Mayhew, “Spatiality,” A Dictionary of Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199231805.001.0001/acref9780199231805-e-2907?rskey=zfsqvt&result=2365. 14 The bridge metaphor is from “Bauen Wohnen Denken” (English: “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”) and the Greek temple metaphor from “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”: respectively in Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” in Vorträge Und Aufsätze, vol. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959); and Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, 6., durchges. Aufl, vol. 5, Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1914–1970 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1980); English: Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, eds. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 15 The dissertation was written in Afrikaans. The English title is “The Phenomenon of Dwelling: A Philosophical-Anthropological Study”: Frederik Jacobus Engelbrecht, Die verskynsel woon: ’n wysgerig-antropologiese studie (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Pretoria, 1977). The dissertation is extraordinary for its almost unacademic style, poetic, written as an almost eyewitness presentation. 16 Jan Hendrik van den Berg, Metabletica of leer der veranderingen. Beginselen van een historische psychologie (Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1956); Jan Hendrik van den Berg, Metabletica van de materie, Deel 1: Meetkundige beschouwingen (Callenbach: Nijkerk, 1968); Jan Hendrik van den Berg, Metabletica van de materie, Deel 2: Gedane zaken, twee omwentelingen in de westerse geestesgeschiedenis (Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1977). 17 On the spatial dimensions of the Homeric epics, see Marios Skempis and Ioannis Ziogas, eds., Geography, Topography, Landscape: Configurations of Space in Greek and Roman Epic, Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes 22 (Berlin; Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2014), 4. 18 Amongst others, see the work of Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London; New York, NY: Verso, 1999); Robert T. Tally, ed., Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Robert T. Tally, ed., Literary Cartographies – Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 19 Johan N. Prinsloo, “The Resurrection of Adonis: Towards a Mytho-Poetics for Contemporary Landscape Architecture” (paper read at the Inter-Disciplinary.Net conference “Space and Place,” Oxford, September 2014), 3–4. See also Johan N. Prinsloo, “DePicturing the Landscape: Notes on the Value of Text for the Conception and Experience of Landscape,” in South African Landscape Architecture: A Reader, eds. Gerrit Hendrik Stoffberg, Clinton Hindes, and Liana Müller (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2012), 27–40. 20 Kanishka Goonewardena, “The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics,” Antipode 37, no. 1 (2005): 46–71. 21 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991); Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

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22 Edward Soja adapted these terms to his equally famous terminological set of Firstspace (Physical space/perceived space) – the concrete materiality of spatial forms; Secondspace (Mental space/conceived space) – ideas about space, re-presentations of human spatiality in mental or cognitive forms; and Thirdspace (Social space/lived space) – the real-and-imagined places as arena of socially lived life. The French term “représentation” as used by Lefebvre should probably be understood in the political sense of “making representations.” 23 See the introduction to Jon Anderson, Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 1–12. 24 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 117–130. The citation is from p. 117. 25 Gerhard van den Heever, “Space, Social Space, and the Construction of Christian Identity in First Century Asia Minor,” Religion & Theology 17, no. 3–4 (2010): 229. 26 Burke O. Long, Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). 27 See www.holylandexperience.com.

2 THE NOMADIC CLASSROOM Encountering literary art through affective learning Christian Beck

Gilles Deleuze does not explicitly discuss pedagogy at length; however, in Difference and Repetition he briefly suggests a pedagogical approach, stating, “We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me,’ and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.”1 I want to posit a simple proposition that builds on this premise: Take your literature class to different places/spaces on campus and conduct the course as you generally would in a standard classroom. Students often ask to “have class outside” on a nice day, but many of us probably demur and offer up reasons that cite distractions, what needs to be covered, or some similar excuse that points to the organized, sanitized, controlled environment of the classroom. These excuses are precisely why the class needs to be displaced from its designated room: learning is not a controlled or sanitized act. Learning comes from experience and experimentation; learning comes from negotiating the signs of the world that spring up around us, and developing meaningful ways to understand them. As Deleuze states, “Learning is essentially concerned with signs. [. . .] Everything that teaches us something emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs.”2 Learning means confronting difference. This might be possible within the general classroom, but when we are considering spaces, places, and mapping (in literature and the world), then the signs that concern us are not solely in a text or a classroom, but in the spaces where life is lived. So we must go to them. In what follows, I explore what learning means for Deleuze and how this particular understanding compliments a literature classroom investigating place, space, and mapping. I argue that the facilitation of learning stems from disrupting the classroom space by moving it to various locations around campus. Constructing this type of course with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomad in mind helps students develop critical insight into the spatial construction of literary places and everyday spaces. Associated with the nomad are the conceptual pairs of de/ reterritorialization and smooth and striated space. I show how the deterritorialized

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smooth space created by the nomadic classroom becomes an important site for learning. Finally, I discuss the nomad – also referred to as the machine de guerre – as a destabilizing and subversive conceptual entity. Thus, the nomadic classroom can engage with radical politics as a spatial and literary intervention. In the end, my essay shows how deterritorializing the classroom produces a site of experiential learning: a nomadic classroom that informs, undoes, and exceeds a traditional literary classroom.

Learning In Proust and Signs, Deleuze identifies four types of signs: worldly signs of society, amorous signs found in passion and jealousy, sensuous signs of involuntary memory, and the signs of art. Deleuze reads Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as a search oriented toward the future, not the past; he positions the narrator of the text as an apprentice to signs. Much like the young Marcel of the Recherche, we too are apprentices to signs: in order to understand and operate in the world around us, we must both interpret these signs and use our interpretations to navigate our social space. But, as Ronald Bogue points out, learning for Deleuze does not mean the acquisition of a new skill or memorizing new information; rather, learning is “the accession to a new way of perceiving and understanding the world. To interpret signs is to overcome ‘stock notions,’ ‘natural’ or ‘habitual’ modes of comprehending.”3 If learning requires overcoming the natural or habitual ways of understanding the world, then trying to prevail over these ways of thinking in a space that is bent on reproducing these very same modes acts against the goal of learning. The university classroom is always a repetition of the same. The art (or content) we encounter in the classroom space will be different and will undoubtedly yield new truth. However, confronting difference and interpreting a work of art in a space that is always the same creates what Foucault calls an “enclosed space” – this is to say nothing about the number of times the same text has been taught repeatedly in the same room, at the same time of day.4 Where we confront difference is as important as the confrontation itself; if the encounter continually occurs in the same space, this begins to codify the behavior and limit the action to that particular space: the classroom is where we analyze literature and we analyze literature in the classroom. Deleuze writes, “What forces us to think is the sign. The sign is the object of an encounter, but it is precisely the contingency of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what it leads us to think.”5 The organized, controlled space of the classroom removes contingency and, to a certain degree, removes the encounter as well. The encounter is with the literary text, but meeting in the same room, at the same time, and sitting in the same location mitigates the multiplicity and possibilities of the textual encounter: the number of possible connections are reduced and the control of the space is reproduced.6 By moving out of the classroom, the focus of the class becomes dispersed in space – no longer is the instructor leading a discussion of a literary text. Rather, the location begins to show the variations of the text and the role of the apprentice. As

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Kaustuv Roy states, “The participant is deterritorialized, or thrown into differently ordered spatial relations wherein the affective and perceptive orders no longer fully conform to the habitual geographies of identitarian space.”7 In other words, the new space rearranges the ways in which students respond to the text, each other, and the instructor – these categories are necessarily disrupted by exiting the space that codifies these identities. Similarly, the space also puts the issues of the text in new light, pushing the boundaries of the text and spatial context. In these conditions, in the space of the new, learning can occur. Inna Semetsky writes: For learning to occur, the meaningful relation between a sign and a response must be established, leading – via the encounter with otherness and indeterminacy inscribed in experience – to what Deleuze identified as the repetition of the different. It is the difference embedded in real experience that precludes any prior recognition; the particularity of an experiential situation creates an experiment with the new in the unfamiliar and even strange context, which would have resisted being recognized as something already familiar.8 The continued and sustained use of new spaces for the class becomes a repetition of the different, this practice creates new unfamiliar organizations and relations, and provides the site for instructors to “emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity.”9 Every individual does not react to every space the same – a class is not a monolith. Nevertheless, there is a connection amongst the group that is forged through the occupation of new spaces and it cuts through the status quo to find an expression in a restless, at times defiant group engaging in more than literary analysis. The class that moves spaces, remaking itself anew every week is also becoming-nomad.

Nomadic lessons For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-nomad means existing in space differently than a “sedentary” person. The nomad does not affect space in the same way as a State and its constituent members. A nomad makes visible the constructed, “natural,” or “habitual” elements of State or sedentary controlled space. The nomad creates smooth space. Deleuze and Guattari write, “Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without ‘counting’ it and can ‘be explored only by legwork.’”10 Smooth space is contrasted with striated space, which is “counted in order to be occupied.”11 For example, your classroom that has a maximum occupancy determined by a fire marshal or some other state official is a striated space; similarly, the organization of paths, walkways, roads, entrances, and exits you use to get to your classroom are also striated spaces and make up the larger striated space of the campus. The nomad creates smooth space through the process of deterritorialization: a process that strips meaning, ideology, and cultural practices from a particular place and reorganizes or elides concepts like ownership, claim, identity, and subject. Ian Buchanan notes

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that deterritorialization is “the process whereby the very basis of one’s identity, the proverbial ground beneath our feet, is eroded, washed away like the bank of a river swollen by floodwater.”12 Through this act, the nomad creates a smooth space that allows for, indeed engenders new forms of association, relationships, connections, and approaches that hitherto have been foreclosed, disallowed, or unseen. The mobile classroom not only remakes the space that is occupied, but makes anew the identities that inhabit the new classroom space. The instructor is always more than an instructor and also less. Likewise, students are able, like the instructor, to exceed the limits of their “educational identities.” Furthermore, when the class sits in a public place, people that are not in the class may join the discussion, new questions will be asked (of the students and of the instructor), and new intersections are created merely by the presence of someone new in a different place. The group dynamic shifts and the traditional identities “erode” in the wave of deterritorialization – the class is becoming-nomad at the same time the deterritorialized space is being made smooth. Taking a class to a new place does not make the group nomadic: rather, the event of holding class in a new place, which introduces contingencies, possibilities, and new signs, and the practice of openly encouraging and embracing these elements enacts deterritorialization, which smooths space, and thereby creates the nomadic classroom. All the participants of the class must be aware of this process so that the introduction and nurturing of the event can (and should) come from any point (person or group) within the multiplicity. This means that in this educational “field” or “plane” there is no single instructor or student. Rather, in the words of Kaustuv Roy, “the plane is the teacher.”13 In this space, learning occurs in a multifaceted and seemingly “disorganized” way because it is not a reproduction of the hierarchical structure of knowledge dictated and codified by the traditional classroom. We do not learn “from” someone, but rather we learn “with” the group: “We never learn by doing like someone, but by doing with someone, who bears no resemblance to what we are learning.”14 The experience of the smooth space, the deterritorializing event, and the class transition to becoming-nomad highlight the importance of spatial structures and the fragility of space. Students can use the events of class to analyze literary spaces and discuss ways the text creates the fictional spaces of a narrative. Deleuze writes, “The real theme of a work is therefore not the subject the words designate, but the unconscious themes, the involuntary archetypes in which the words, but also the colors and the sounds, assume their meaning and their life.”15 The spaces and places of a literary work could be added to this assessment. Students can begin to see and ask what types of spatial assemblages are utilized in the text; what type of behavior does the space elicit; how is space recreated, subverted, restored, or otherwise transformed and what event(s) precipitated this change? These types of questions, however, are not limited to the text, but begin to seep into lived experience; art and the world intermingle and inform one another. The connections between fiction and experience are not limited to relating past experiences to the text, but can also reach into the future where the truth of the text informs experiences yet to come. The words of the text, as well as the colors, sounds, and spatiality, begin to form

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involuntary archetypes for the individual where a (connected) life begins to assume meaning. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, new lines of flight are created through the interplay amongst past-experiences, the text, and future-experiences. In other words, new actions, new approaches, and new thoughts emerge that will lead to acts of creation. The nomadic classroom does more than offer up experiences to be used in literary analysis. There is a socio-political edge to this tactic that invites all participants to see how spaces are controlled and to try to imagine these spaces anew. Students are often fast to judge fictional spaces, but are less inclined to interrogate the spaces of our communities, institutions, and states. The nomadic classroom creates an environment that is simultaneously a position of critical analysis, as well as action. The nomadic classroom, through the process of deterritorialization punctures the academic, institutionalized educational space and lays bare the vast amount of possibilities found, very literally, outside of the classroom.

Educational deterritorialization For Deleuze and Guattari, the nomad is a disruptive entity to the status quo; more specifically, the nomad ruptures the State. The State is the territorial entity that, as Deleuze and Guattari write, is “defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs of power.”16 Power is the centralizing issue for the state and control over its territory is how it best expresses that power: “The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally.”17 Furthermore, it is this State entity that “makes the distinction between governors and governed possible.”18 From a strictly spatial perspective, the State creates striated space, thereby asserting its sovereignty and claim over a particular territory, and uses its “organs of power” to govern those that live within its territorial oversight. In other words, the space is determined not by the “sedentary” people using it, but by an entity that is “elsewhere” and yet claims sovereign right over the space: “the sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediated by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus.”19 The nomad, however, directly challenges the State mediated relationship to space. As an agent of deterritorialization, the nomad undoes relationships: human to earth, human to property, human to animal, human to nature, human to human, etc. But most importantly, the nomad undoes the relationship between the human and the self that is constructed by the State through striated space.20 The nomadic classroom, where the agency of the nomad is appended to the class and not to singular students or the instructor, deterritorializes striated space so as to grant the class participants with a higher degree of determinacy. In other words, the participants within the class are free to determine their own spatial arrangement, a decision that is not restricted to the striation of the space. While seated in an arena, for example, participants may sit in the aisles, on the floor, or stand on seats. They are not required to participate in the pre-ordained spatial order.21 The space and the act of deterritorialization have an effect on the participants that exceeds a singular class, or even the course. Participants often find a new sense of freedom that

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comes with becoming-nomad and this feeling of liberation is an affective response to smooth space. “Affect,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack. . . . Affects are projectiles just like weapons.”22 This “affective weapon” then turns further outward and participants begin to grasp the potential of deterritorializing other aspects of their education. There is an active, rather than passive, quality to the “affective weapons” of the nomad. Seeing the change that is brought about by the active engagement with one’s learning, students begin to notice the various and multiple controlling regimes that surround and structure their everyday spaces. They see how the State’s “territorial principle” does not provide their freedom, but rather limits possibilities and relationships.23 While the course remains firmly a literature class and the students can often point to the ways in which a territorial principle works in a text, the relevance to the current neoliberal nation-state does not go unnoticed. The contemporary trends in travel restrictions and the rise of nationalist agendas serve as examples that the “response of the State against all that threatens to move beyond it is to striate space.”24 The discussions that take place regarding literary spaces spill into discussions about current events and lived spaces. This marks not only the socio-political edge of the nomadic classroom, but implicitly posits the necessity of literary classrooms and the humanities more generally. Creative forms of resistance to draconian State mandates arise at the intersection of the deterritorialized classroom, literary fiction, and contemporary spatial conflicts. The nomadic classroom creates a space to critically identify restrictive and oppressive forms of governance and posit possible ways of counteracting them. If, as Deleuze and Guattari state, “Weapons are affects and affects weapons,”25 then the literary classroom that discusses place, space, and mapping is precisely the place “to look for new weapons.”26

Conclusion Deleuze, citing Proust’s Time Regained, highlights the possibilities art produces: Only by art can we emerge from ourselves, can we know what another sees of this universe that is not the same as ours and whose landscapes would have remained as unknown to us as those that might be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply, as many original artists as there are, so many worlds will we have at our disposal, more different from each other than those that circle in the void.27 Literature opens up new worlds and possibilities. As such, we encounter difference through the new worlds created by art. By stepping into these worlds, we engage critically with difference to reveal truths, and encounter their (possible) applicability to our experience, our world. Deleuze writes, “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. . . . It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering.”28 The encounter activates more than just the mental faculties, it employs

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any number of senses and affects and pushes us to think anew, not simply recall a previous object, experience, or set of knowledge claims. In a literature class, the text often produces an encounter. However, in the nomadic classroom, the encounter may come from any number of sites or contingencies. The encounter may not be with the text, but with the space, people around the space, objects in the space, or the discomfort of discussing the text in a public place. The oscillation between text, space, and experience generates signs, encounters, affects, thinking, and learning. From this point, students can begin a journey of creation that ventures into new spaces, territories, and encounters that far exceed the classroom space, as well as the duration of the course. Inna Semetsky writes that Deleuze and Guattari “suggest that it is what we do not know, rather than what we do, that is of educational significance. The corollary is that education is to be committed to experimentation rather than transmission of pre-existing facts or inculcation of given values in the classroom.”29 The traditional classroom is a known and controlled space; the nomadic classroom introduces the unknown through experimental uses of space. Furthermore, the nomadic classroom produces a space that creates an encounter with difference while also establishing the values of equality and freedom. The participants of the class are brought together in solidarity and work to maintain the free and equal environment within the smooth space of the deterritorialized classroom. As instructors, we are also participants of the nomadic classroom and we must work with the other participants to think through the contingencies and encounters of this type of affective learning. This requires a “letting go” or an “undoing” of our traditional educational identity; to amend a phrase by Deleuze and Guattari: “the ‘not-doing’ of the [instructor], the undoing of the subject.”30 To see a world free of oppression and domination, we must be able to show that smooth spaces are possible and that through literature we can encounter and navigate difference with careful thinking and thought, “Because the less people take thought seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the State wants.”31 The nomadic classroom induces thought through movement and deterritorialization and reveals smooth space as pregnant with political multiplicities.32 The worlds we encounter in art give new vision to lived worlds. The nomadic classroom shows how spaces can be transformed. The nomadic literary course provides the tools necessary to confront and change elements of oppression and acts of domination that seek to limit movement and deride creative, critical thought. The nomadic literary classroom creates a deterritorialized space of resistance: a creative, innovative, and educational machine de guerre.33

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press), 23. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4. 3 Ronald Bogue, “Search, Swim, and See: Deleuze’s Apprenticeship in Signs and Pedagogy of Images,” in Nomadic Education: Variations on a Theme By Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Inna Semetsky (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008), 2.

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4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 141. 5 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 97. 6 There is an implied link here to Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7. Also see, Michael A Peters, “Education and ‘Societies of Control: From Disciplinary Pedagogy to Perpetual Training,” Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice 3 (2011): 7–32. 7 Kaustuv Roy, “Power and Resistance: Insurgent Spaces, Deleuze, and Curriculum,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 21 (2005): 31. 8 Inna Semetsky, “Towards a Semiotic Theory of Learning: Deleuze’s Philosophy and Educational Experience,” Semiotica 164 (2007): 202. 9 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 23. 10 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gauttari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 371. 11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 362. 12 Ian Buchanan, “Space in the Age of Non-Place,” in Deleuze and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 23. 13 Roy, “Power and Resistance,” 37. 14 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 22. 15 Ibid., 47. 16 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 357. 17 Ibid., 360. 18 Ibid., 359. 19 Ibid., 381. 20 Ibid., 400. 21 Indeed, the instructor may attempt to re-order the students, but students are often emboldened simply by leaving the classroom and are likely to resist. Furthermore, if the instructor attempts to order the participants, this becomes an act of striation and power that mirrors the State’s desire to control people within a given territory. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 400. 23 Ibid., 388. As the authors go on to claim, “Property is precisely the deterritorialized relations between the human being and the earth.” 24 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 386. 25 Ibid., 400. 26 Deleuze, “Societies of Control,” 4. 27 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 42. 28 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 139. 29 Inna Semetsky, “(Pre)Facing Deleuze,” in Nomadic Education, xvii. 30 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 400. 31 Ibid., 376. 32 See David R. Cole, “Inter-collapse . . . Educational Nomadology for a Future Generation,” in Deleuze and Guattari: Politics and Education, eds. Matthew Carlin and Jason Wallin (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 77–95. 33 I would like to thank Bruce Janz for his immensely helpful insights and suggestions at the beginning of this project. I also want to extend my gratitude to my LIT 3206 “Literature of Place and Space” courses (past and present) for their insights, participation, and suggestions. Thinking through these ideas is only possible with active engagement of the participants, so thank you all. Lastly, thank you to Giselda Beaudin for tirelessly reading drafts and discussing Deleuze.

3 AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PEDAGOGY FOR A GRADUATE COURSE IN SPATIAL STUDIES Jordan Hill

Graduate-level spatial studies courses offer great potential for helping graduate students to develop their interdisciplinary critical and analytical skills, but such courses also present unique challenges in conveying the benefits of engaging with this new field of study. On the one hand, the research of every emerging scholar occurs in some space or place. Yet for many students, space is assumed to just be the container where things take place, not a concept and category that has its own history and ability to impact and alter the agency of human actors. Spatial studies offers a range of theoretical and methodological tools for creating scholarship that directly addresses the spatial dimensions of one’s research in productive and fruitful ways. On the other hand, while concepts such as gender, culture, identity, and the environment enjoy widespread contemporary popularity and engagement across academic disciplines, the concept of space is often thought to be the purview of the “spatial disciplines,” which are generally understood to be geography, architecture, and urban planning. But space actually offers a larger framework that can deepen our understanding of all these concepts: an analysis of gendered spaces, cultural places, spatial identities, and the spatial dynamics of environmental concerns. Moreover, the study of space has now moved beyond the spatial disciplines and has become central to the cutting edge scholarship occurring in a broad array of disciplines and fields throughout the academy. Spatial studies is the result of the “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities which “applied a far reaching critique to basic categories of space, time and the [socially] constituted under the era of modernity.”1 The spatial turn was initiated in the 1970s by Henri Lefebvre’s pioneering work The Production of Space, Foucault’s diverse spatial-historical analyses,Yu-Fi Tuan’s Topophilia, and David Harvey’s Social Justice in the City, among others. In the 1980s, the social production of space and its impact on identity formation began to be explored and developed in important early works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Derek Gregory, John Urry, Edward

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Soja, and Doreen Massey.2 By the 1990s, the spatial turn burst into the academy internationally and resulted in the deployment of spatial analysis and thinking across the disciplines. At the heart of the spatial turn was a fundamental critique of the proposition that “space” is not merely where longstanding concepts like politics, culture, and social interaction take place, but that space itself needs to be analyzed as a foundational concept and potentially motive force in human relations and history. In the twenty-first century, spatial studies now inform broadly theoretical and constructive research in the humanities, but spatiality is also increasingly deployed in digital analyses through Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and other data driven projects. In this chapter, I will outline and explain the value of developing pedagogy for teaching about the spatial turn in an interdisciplinary spatial studies graduate course. I will do this by focusing on the two integrated elements that hold the most promise of creating an innovative and engaging course that covers the wide array of literature available in this field of study. First, I will advocate for the intentional creation of a broad interdisciplinary syllabus that engages with a variety of different disciplines. To do this, I will discuss novel methods of scheduling, the benefits of collaborative teaching, disciplinary literature that is focused on spaces in the region where one teaches, and the incorporation of non-traditional coursework that seeks to develop students’ understanding of the many dimensions of space. The second element of this pedagogy is a strategic use of some of the seminal works of critical spatial theory. While many scholars wrongly assume that spatial theory is only accessible to the most erudite professionals, I will present a non-sequential historiographical ordering of these texts with notes on specific chapters and sections that is aimed at facilitating accessible exposure to complex theories for graduate students. Spatial studies developed from the insights of many different disciplines, and this chapter will illustrate a pedagogical method for constructing a learning space that intentionally integrates those perspectives in the graduate classroom.

Interdisciplinary spatial studies pedagogy With the growth of spatial thinking and analysis across the academy in the past four decades, it is feasible that a graduate spatial studies course could now be taught from a single disciplinary perspective, but this would be a missed opportunity. A diverse range of spatial insights have been developed in a wide array of disciplines, and highlighting the many contributions of different fields in effecting the spatial turn should be an objective when designing a course. In this section, I will briefly outline the value of development of a robust interdisciplinary syllabus that uses an “alternating weeks” schedule that switches between spatial theory and texts from a range of different disciplines that are spatially oriented. This pedagogical method is aimed at giving students time to process spatial theory and creating a class atmosphere that feels diverse and spacious. I encourage teachers to search for spatial literature from different disciplines that is specific to the location or region of the class in order to further deepen learning potentials by investing students in

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the material in a more personal way. Lastly, I will discuss the value of collaborative teaching with faculty across campus and beyond, and I will advocate specifically for the adoption of “sketching” as a method to strengthen students’ ability to analyze and think about space in new ways. An interdisciplinary pedagogy built upon these tenets will facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the spatial turn and provide the emerging scholars with a powerful set of intellectual tools for producing innovative spatial scholarship. Moving students from the assumption that space “just is” to a more nuanced understanding of its manifold dimensions requires an interdisciplinary method for integrating the different disciplinary insights of the spatial turn. I draw inspiration from Allen F. Repko’s impressive review of the concept of interdisciplinarity and his definition of interdisciplinary studies as “a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline, and draws on disciplines with the goal of integrating their insights to construct a more comprehensive understanding.”3 Practically speaking, the creation of a reading schedule that alternates reading disciplinary spatial texts on even weeks and spatial theory on odd weeks provides a firm foundation for the promotion of integrative thinking across the disciplines. For the spatial disciplinary texts on even weeks, I suggest reading a different discipline each week in order to cover six to eight disciplines in the course of the semester. Teaching spatial theory every other week provides students with an intellectual break that allows the theory to sink in over time without becoming overwhelming. Lastly, a “narrow interdisciplinary” method that only looks at closely related social science disciplines, for example, will also miss the research being done in other departments across your campus.4 By constructing a “broad interdisciplinary” syllabus that engages “disciplines with little or no [assumed] compatibility,” a teacher can expose students to the full breadth of the spatial turn and create the potential for them to produce scholarship that integrates the insights of dissimilar disciplines.5 To strategically promote student investment in their learning, one should consider selecting disciplinary spatial texts that are focused on analyzing local and regional spaces and places. In my recent “Spatial Constructions of Colorado” course, which I taught in the Fall 2015 semester, I discovered a number of recent publications that quickly became some of the most popular texts in the course. William Phillipot’s Vacationland: Tourism and the Environment in the Colorado High Country, for example, is a searing spatial history that details how a post-World War II Colorado Board of Tourism marketing campaign effectively transformed Colorado citizens into reliable promoters of the active outdoor lifestyle offered by the state and its high alpine environment.6 From sociology, Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Pellow’s The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden articulates the ways Hispanic workers who do most of the labor in Aspen are actively excluded from visibility in the town’s social spaces, and the authors coin the term “environmental privilege” to denote the common local hypocrisy by which “some groups can access spaces and resources, which are protected from the kinds of ecological harm that other groups are forced to contend with everyday.”7 These texts, along with class favorite

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“The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing,” challenged my students, most of whom are natives of Colorado, by illustrating how spatial thinking and planning influences their identity and perception of the place they call home.8 By assigning disciplinary spatial texts specific to one’s own region, teachers and students make a personal connection with the value of understanding spatial analysis and become more deeply invested in their study and coursework. Collaborative teaching with faculty from other departments enhances both the interdisciplinarity and the range of interest in the course. Working specifically with an architecture or urban planning colleague to teach students how to “sketch” can deepen the quality of your interdisciplinary pedagogy. I contacted faculty from both my own university and colleagues at nearby universities, and was able to quickly assemble a team for collaborative teaching of five of the 15 class meetings in my semester. Instead of inviting them merely to guest lecture, I sought out faculty who were willing to share the classroom space with me in order to create a true collaborative atmosphere. In the architecture and planning disciplines, in particular, “sketching” is a method of visually taking notes that helps students observe and record spatial relationships in ways that are not readily accessible via only thinking or writing. One common misunderstanding to dispel is that one need not be an artist in order to sketch; it is a skill that is accessible to even the least artistic! My colleague in landscape architecture gave my students a quick crash course in sketching early in the semester, and students were required to carry a pocket sized sketch book with them and sketch regularly throughout the semester.9 Students consistently gave rave reviews about both the collaborative teaching and sketching dimension of the course, and many commented that each method helped to expand their spatial learning in important ways. Constructing a broad and intentionally interdisciplinary syllabus using an alternative weeks scheduling technique, disciplinary texts focused on local spaces, critical spatial theory, collaborative teaching, and regular sketching collectively create a pedagogy that is prepared to unlock the insights of the spatial turn for graduate students.

A pragmatic pedagogy for critical spatial theory There are a handful of books that make up an unofficial canon of critical spatial theory which are central to understanding the spatial turn and the contemporary scholarship that it has inspired. Many of these texts, however, have garnered a reputation of being inaccessible or of being in the purview of only the most theoretically inclined scholars. These assumptions are unfortunate, and in this section I want to demystify some of these important texts by detailing the ideas and concepts that deserve to be read in a graduate classroom. What each of these theoretical texts offer is a diverse range of interpretations for how space is constructed, deployed, and appropriated in the framing and forming of human agency and subjectivity. This is particularly important for a class that is intentionally designed to be interdisciplinary and seeks to generate interests from graduate students from a broad array of disciplines across campus. I would encourage teachers not to lecture students on

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what these texts mean, but to allow and encourage varied interpretations to emerge in your discussion. I have found this method to result in fruitful contributions for different disciplinary insights, thereby increasing student engagement and enjoyment more generally. I will begin by suggesting a handful of early and accessible texts in spatial scholarship that can be used as good “icebreakers” at the start of the semester to get students thinking critically about space. While the following selection of critical spatial theory texts is by no means comprehensive, it is representative of some important works of interdisciplinary spatial theory. Starting with a few short texts from early and influential spatial thinkers is a great way to break the ice at the beginning of the semester. Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” illustrates how at the outset of the modern era there was recognition of the need to consider “the inner life against the domination of the metropolis.”10 In the mid-twentieth century, both the introduction to Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities and Arthur M. Schlesinger’s “The City in American Life” confront the growth and impact of the urban city on modern society.11 On the other hand, selections from Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden and Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States provide historical context for the transformation of pastoral land and the suburbanization of the late twentieth century.12 The religious and ritualistic dimensions of space can be compellingly engaged in Mircea Eliade’s classic The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, and this can be juxtaposed, later in the semester, with the rebuttal of Johnathan Z. Smith in the preface and fifth chapter of To Take Place: Toward a Theory in Ritual.13 Yi-Fu Tuan’s introduction to Topophilia is one of the most accessible examples of writing from the early spatial turn, and it helps students to come to terms with the human dimensions of space and place.14 These spatial texts are great for early semester reading to help prepare students for the critical spatial theory to come. I begin the exploration of critical spatial theory with a range of works from Michel Foucault, due in part to his popularity, recognition, and standing as a central figure within various fields, albeit with a marked de-emphasis of his highly over referenced “Panopticism” chapter from Discipline and Punish. The short interview “Space, Knowledge, Power” is an excellent primer for Foucault’s many spatial examinations.15 The recent publication of Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France offer some of his most compelling and accessible spatial theory. I have built this section of the course around his analysis of the spatial ordering of European cities during the bubonic plague in the second and third lectures of Security, Territory, Population on “Spaces of Security” and “Emergence of ‘Population.”16 Foucault’s ranging analysis of the spatial dimensions of the management of the plague shows a diversity of early modern strategies for the classification and segmenting of urban space. I then offer three Foucauldian case studies on the church confessional, the hospital, and the prison, which is where the discussion of the panopticon belongs.17 While I acknowledge the importance of Foucault’s essay “Of Other Spaces,” which introduces the concept of “heterotopias,” I have found it a difficult piece to engage so early in the semester and suggest perhaps paring it with texts on the ritualization

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of space (J. Z. Smith) later in the semester, or skipping it altogether.18 Collectively, these texts help to initiate the study of critical spatial theory with short pieces that are generally accessible and stimulate engagement due to the ongoing popularity of Foucault, and his importance as an early and influential spatial thinker. After Foucault, I move on to arguably the most important work in spatial theory, Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. In this pioneering book, Lefebvre lays out both a historical and theoretical foundation for the entire spatial turn by deftly explaining the political, ideological, and technological dimension of the production of space.19 The means by which Lefebvre explains this is through his “spatial triad,” which consists of “spatial practice,” “representations of space,” and “representational spaces.”20 The attempt to give a concise definition of these three ideas can often significantly circumscribe, if not completely fail to capture, the nuanced and expansive nature of these concepts. Pedagogically, this can limit the potential insights from graduate students, so I encourage moderating the discussion and offering provocations instead of dictating specific meanings. The first chapter of The Production of Space, “The Plan of the Present Work” provides history, explains the triad, and should be read completely. The second chapter, “Social Space,” is also very good, but the first three sections are sufficient if time does not permit covering it in its entirety. A brief note on my past graduate student’s reading, reception, and use of Lefebvre bears mentioning. At the outset of our discussion of The Production of Space, students are often confused about the language and meaning of the text. By the end of our class discussion, they feel more confident but still question if they understand the text in a way that will enable them to apply the concepts fruitfully. By the end of the semester, however, and after exposure to so many other theorists who have built upon his theories, Lefebvre’s ideas become central to the writing of nearly every student in the course in their final paper, and often Lefebvre’s ideas have carried over into their thesis and dissertation projects. The work of David Harvey and Neil Smith are vital to understanding the spaces of global (neoliberal) capitalism, and many different pairings of their work can work in exploring these dimensions. While Harvey’s Social Justice and the City is a classic that might be appropriate depending on the larger aim of one’s syllabus, his more recent work is updated and more helpful in understanding contemporary economic space.21 In The New Imperialism, Harvey discusses the important concept of accumulation by dispossession and situates neoliberal capitalism spatially.22 His more recent Spaces of Global Capitalism is a collection of short articles, with “Space as a key word” and “Notes toward a theory of uneven geographical development,” being concise introductions to his work.23 In a related vein, the introduction and chapter five of Smith’s classic Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space are other important works to consider.24 Together, these two thinkers will help students to grapple with the economic dimensions of space in neoliberal times. To embody a broad interdisciplinarity in your syllabus, it is vital to include some selection of architectural (and urban planning) theory so that your students understand the central assumptions of the disciplines that design and build modern spaces.

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The foundation of this literature, which could alternatively be read in the “early texts” section at the beginning of the semester, is the introduction to Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, the text that singlehandedly ushers in the theory of “modern architecture.”25 After Le Corbusier, Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City is a classic and important work of architectural and planning theory that I suggest adopting because it is accessible to students who don’t have an architectural background.26 Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City is the other classic text that could be used in place of, or together with, Lynch.27 In addition to reading these texts as theories of practice, it is vital to begin to apply the critical insights of Foucault and Lefebvre to one’s reading of these texts in order to problematize the disciplinary assumptions of the practical dimensions of the modern built environment. Two other important texts offer important internal critiques of architecture and urban planning. Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, presents arguably the most controversial architectural theory of the twentieth century due to its critique of modern architecture as being “dissatisfied with existing conditions. Modern architecture has [. . .] preferred to change the existing environment rather than enhance what is there.”28 This book takes aim at modern architecture via a critique of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus School, and Mies Van Der Rohe (among others), and the text is accessible to non-architecture students who have been exposed to these thinkers and Lynch and Rossi. The infamous second section of the book on “the duck” and “the shed” is not only entertaining, but is also the section that many of my students have said helped them to grasp the authors’ critique.29 Using a Foucauldian genealogical approach, Christine Boyer’s Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning is theory interwoven with history that illustrates that despite claims of seeking to create a beautiful and rational order, American “city planning [sought] to impose disciplinary order and supervisory direction over the spatial order of the American city.”30 After having read and critiqued some of the foundations of modern architectural theory and practice, exposing students to the work of Venturi and Boyer will help them to link critical spatial theory pragmatically to the practice of spatial design and construction. With the foundation in critical spatial theory outlined above, I devote the end of the semester to engaging with Jürgen Habermas’s “public sphere” and Michel de Certeau’s articulation of strategies and tactics. The first two chapters of Habermas’s oft-cited The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere details modern conceptions of the “public sphere” and a political and economic critique of its exclusive bourgeois emergence and limited historical scope. Questions of access and the longevity of the initial public spheres Habermas details readily lead to engaging discussions of the similar issues in contemporary understandings and engagement in public space.31 De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life begins with a compelling differentiation between “strategy” and “tactics” that will get students thinking critically about the power and influence of seemingly mundane spatial practices.32 The remainder of the text is more poetic and can be used in a number of ways, but I have received positive feedback about my pairing of the “Walking the City”

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chapter with the assignment for students to “just walk, observe, and sketch” the city for four to five straight hours.33 By waiting until the end of the semester to examine Habermas and de Certeau, students are given time to build a foundation in critical spatial theory, and then engage meaningfully with texts that might be more difficult without adequate preparation. Moreover, this slow but intentional engagement with a broad interdisciplinary range of important spatial theory texts will help to unlock the insights of the spatial turn for graduate students, and perhaps even for the instructor as well.

Conclusion Integration has long been the cornerstone of strong interdisciplinary scholarship, but fostering the conditions for it to occur in a graduate classroom requires strategic planning, innovative pedagogical practices, and diverse engagement with texts from across the disciplines.34 In this chapter, I have outlined a range of pedagogical methods and practices based on my own experience. It is by no means necessary to adopt all of these suggestions in their totality in order to create a successful course. What I hope to have shown, however, is that to prepare graduate students to be conversant in spatial thinking and analysis, it is essential to expose them to a robust interdisciplinary presentation of spatial literature, pedagogy, and practice. In so doing, instructors can create a learning space that will enable students to enter into the scholarly conversation on spatiality and contribute meaningfully to the ongoing development of the spatial turn.

Notes 1 Henk Van Houtum, Oliver Kramsch, and Wolfgang Zierhofer, eds., B/Ordering Space (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 4. 2 Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 1987); Derrick Gregory and John Urry, eds., Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: Macmillan, 1985); Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). 3 Allen F. Repko, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 16. 4 Julie Thompson Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 63. 5 Ibid. 6 William Phillipot, Vacationland: Tourism and the Environment in the Colorado High Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). 7 Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Pellow, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 4. 8 Annie Gilbert Coleman, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 4 (1996): 583–614. 9 I am grateful to Joern Langhorst for his September 2015 presentation on “Sketching” in my “Spatial Constructions of Colorado” course at University of Colorado, Denver. 10 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), 12. 11 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1938); Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The City in American History,” The Mississippi Historical Review 27, no. 1 (June 1940): 43–66.

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12 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 13 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1959); Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward a Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 14 Yu-Fi Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). 15 Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 239–256. 16 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 29–86. 17 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974–1975 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 167–199; Foucault, “The Incorporation of the Hospital into Modern Technology,” trans. Edgar Knowlton Jr., William J. King, and Stuart Elden, in eds. Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden, Space, Knowledge, Power: Foucault and Geography (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007); Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 195–228. 18 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1986), 22–27. 19 Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 8–9. 20 Ibid., 38–39. 21 David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1973). 22 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 23 David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006). 24 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984). 25 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover Publications, 1986). 26 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 27 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 28 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 3. (italics in original). 29 Ibid., 87–104. 30 M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 63. 31 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 32 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xi–xxiv. 33 Ibid., 91–110. 34 Integration has been central to scholarship on interdisciplinarity from the earliest definition of the term. See Julie Thompson Klein and William J. Newell, “Advancing Interdisciplinary Studies,” in Handbook of the Undergraduate Curriculum: A Comprehensive Guide to Purposes, Structure, Practices, and Change, eds. J. G. Gaff and J. L. Radcliff (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 393–415; see also Repko, Interdisciplinary Research.

4 MAPPING MULTIETHNIC TEXTS IN THE LITERARY CLASSROOM GIS and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange Anastasia Lin

In her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2005, Karen Halttunen avows “space and place have never been more analytically important than they have recently become in the humanities and social sciences, demonstrating that globalization – with its acceleration of border crossings – has actually made place more important, not less.”1 Indeed, the spatial turn in the humanities has encouraged a wide array of approaches to understanding the way place and space work within literary studies. Yet, despite the increased focus on space as a new means of literary inquiry, initial reactions to the spatial turn have manifested primarily at the level of metaphor, with little attention focused on mapping within literary studies, or the subfield of literary cartography. In addition, few resources exist to examine exactly what a literary cartographic approach might look like in the literary classroom. As Piatti, et. al. note, “so far no convincing definition of the research area, no concise glossary, no methods or tools have been developed in order to approach these matters in a systematic way.”2 Even with renewed interest in geocriticism and the increasingly commonplace utilization of Digital Humanities approaches, literary cartographic approaches both in and out of the classroom remain stymied by the necessities of collaboration; constructing high quality layered maps of literature requires extensive training that those in literary studies – and their students – do not possess. Yet, literary cartography opens up exciting avenues and new ways of conceptualizing and understanding literary texts. As Piatti and Hurni outline in their editorial “Cartographies of Fictional Worlds,” literary cartography “aims at visibly rendering such complex overlays of real and fictional geographies” in order to “destabilize taken-for-granted geographies.”3 Or, as Martyn Jessop explains, “GIS methodology is much more than digital cartography, it gives the researcher the ability to analyse and display data in a variety of maps, networks or hierarchy trees.”4 I define literary cartography as an approach that utilizes Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

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methodologies to analyze literature on a geographic scale. Such projects enable researchers and students to connect spatial reality to the imagined reality of the text, revealing, in the words of Franco Moretti, that “geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history ‘happens,’ but an active force that pervades the literary field and shapes its depth.”5 Ultimately, literary cartographic approaches engender new ways of re-envisioning not only the themes of a work of literature, but also the ways the geography of the text may counter or reinforce extant understanding of space. In what follows, I trace several approaches to utilizing GIS to enhance the teaching of a multiethnic literary text at multiple levels in the college curriculum. The first approach focuses on the outcomes of a directed undergraduate research project centered on literary cartography, where collaboration with a student researcher with extensive GIS skills led to the creation of layered maps that each offered new ways of understanding and analyzing Karen Tei Yamashita’s text Tropic of Orange. These palimpsestic maps allow for a visualization of the themes of the texts as well as connections to current day issues (environmental, socioeconomic, racial, etc.). The created maps were then used to subsequently teach the same text in a sophomore literary survey, where they allowed students to unearth new ways of analyzing the novel by focusing on the constructed nature of space. Finally, the essay gives an overview of a “virtual learning community” that engaged two separate classes – one of English majors and one of GIS majors – in a hands-on collaborative literary cartography project. The design of this learning community allowed students in both cohorts to work on a multidisciplinary undergraduate research project and to create their own representations and analyses of the text.

Creating the maps The genesis of this extended literary cartography project occurred rather spontaneously through an offhand discussion with then-student John Dees about his research and work in GIS. As he discussed the scope of what GIS could accomplish, we realized it could be an exceptional tool to better understand Karen Tei Yamashita’s intensely place-centered novel Tropic of Orange. Yamashita’s polyvocal novel follows the intertwined stories of seven ethnically-marked characters over seven days as they navigate social, economic, and political forces that constrain their lives. Though billed as a novel set in Los Angeles, the novel opens in Mazatlan, Mexico, and focuses on a magical orange, which sets into motion much of the catastrophe in the novel. The orange, grown on the Tropic of Cancer, possesses the power to draw with it that meridian, effecting a shrinking and expanding of time and space as it moves north. The orange’s reconfiguration of the border between the U.S. and Mexico emblematizes Yamashita’s themes of the woven nature of bodies, space, economics, and politics; even as the orange begins its travels northward, the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles grinds to a halt as the result of an enormous wreck caused by a driver eating a smuggled orange laced with cocaine. The calamity leads to the unlikely collaboration of Los Angelenos of various backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses

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as they try to make sense of the wreck even as LA’s homeless descend on the freeway “creating a community out of a traffic jam.”6 Ultimately, the novel concludes with the realization of the ways in which each of these separately placed, raced, and socially defined characters is firmly entwined into the life of the next. The broad expanse of geographic data and the dense references Yamashita weaves throughout the novel calls for a literary cartographic reading. Yet, as Jessop explores in his essay, my inexperience and lack of training in ArcGIS, the computer program necessary to craft large maps, would make it impossible for me to build alone the layered maps that would allow us to view Yamashita’s text anew. Similarly, John, a student in our Institute for Environmental and Spatial Analysis, felt out of his depth analyzing the transnational, polyvocal text like Yamashita’s. Instead, we developed a collaborative approach (with the help of our university’s generous summer research funding for faculty-student projects) that allowed us to combine our strengths. Our initial critical work on Tropic of Orange followed the ground-breaking Mapping the Lakes Project undertaken at Lancaster University.7 In the Lakes Project, two texts were typed in and then hand-tagged and coded in XML. To expedite the process, our approach involved first scanning the novel Tropic of Orange into an Optical Character Reader (OCR) and then searching for capitalized words and page numbers using the find function in Microsoft Word. This allowed us to quickly tag the majority of geographic references within the text (using Python coding). We followed this with an additional re-read of the text and tagging of any outlying spatial coordinates. Like the Lakes Project, we settled on a relatively simple tagging system that worked with only a few minor issues (owing mostly to the magical realism and compressed time issues in the book); places were tagged as one of the following: origin, visited, referenced, historical. We found over 700 place references scattered throughout Yamashita’s novel. Once our database of place information was created, we uploaded this information into the ArcGIS system to begin building maps. The first map constructed simply pegged every place tag Yamashita left. Yet, from the beginning, even these relatively straight-forward maps revealed new ways of seeing the text. As mentioned, though the text is ostensibly placed in Los Angeles, the points ranged all over the world. Partly this is unsurprising, given that the text starts “in Mazatlan,” yet we were a bit astounded to see the multiplicity of points not only across the western seaboard of the U.S., but also throughout North and South America and stretching as far as Asia. We determined Yamashita’s inclusion of these points demonstrated her intent to create a transnational text that emphasizes the continual flow of people, things, and ideas back and forth across country borders. Our second mapping approach tracked character movement throughout the novel; these maps yielded a better understanding of the depth and breadth of the novel’s focus. These maps also revealed ideas we had missed when simply reading the novel. For example, when plotting out all of the places mentioned or visited by Bobby Ngu and Buzzworm, we realized both characters were closely connected to Asia. While this immediately made sense with Bobby Ngu, whose story narrates that he grew up in Singapore before immigrating to the U.S., Buzzworm’s connection wasn’t as clearly and immediately articulated. Yet, in plotting out the two characters’

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mentioned and visited spots, we realized Buzzworm’s close connection to Asia: he served in Vietnam. Constructing these maps reminded us that the status of Vietnam vet was, logically, earned abroad, and that the soldiers are tightly connected to that country. Once returned to the states, we rarely think of our veterans in the context of the foreign theater of war; however, for veterans like Buzzworm, time spent abroad in war is never far from one’s mind. These straightforward early maps quickly gave way to maps that deepened our spatial reading by layering character location over socioeconomic and ethnic points obtained from census data. The results allowed us to re-read the text spatially, underscoring the always-changing cultural geography of the U.S. For example, we plotted all of the character’s movements in Los Angeles against the average incomes of the area. This allowed us to see the mobility of the characters. Notably, some characters – primarily the homeless and those of lower socioeconomic class – had constrained mobility while the middle class characters ranged more freely around the different areas. Bobby Ngu, a janitor, was the most mobile of all. Although he occupies a lower economic position, his service job allowed him access into the more elite sections of the city. This map helped us understand that while socioeconomic status does certainly delimit mobility, it does not prevent members of the different socioeconomic classes from mingling. In terms of multiethnic literature, this approach can be very useful in fully excavating and understanding the counter-narratives often produced by writers of color. As Louis Hamilton notes, GIS can serve as “a powerful tool for social and political analysis on an increasingly minute level.”8 Indeed, other maps exposed connections between ethnicity, economic need, and housing practices, while still others traced deepened histories of colonization or the impact of gang violence on certain areas. This realization allowed us to connect our reading more closely the recent “spatial turn” in the humanities, where place and space are understood as a social construction contrived by those who live in a certain area. Postmodern geographers like Edward Soja,9 Mike Davis,10 and David Harvey11 have investigated how the relationships between place and power function to uphold dominant narratives of space thereby obscuring more fluid and spatially-focused conceptions of how culture and capital construct space across borders. For each of these theorists, as Eric Bulson explains, “ways of representing the city are decisively influenced by material conditions, political, historical, and social contexts, and literary conditions.”12 Approaching Yamashita’s text via literary cartography allows for a visualization of her themes of the human cost of globalization, the intertwined nature of socioeconomic class and race, and the transnationality already inherent in the United States.

Literary cartography and pedagogy The maps John and I created have found a second life and a directed purpose in teaching of Tropic of Orange in the sophomore survey, a required core class typically filled with an amalgamation of majors. Most students take this course to satisfy a requirement, not because they are interested in literature or multiethnic literature.

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Thus, teaching Yamashita’s genre-crossing and polyvocal novel comes with quite a few hurdles. First, because Yamashita’s novel is centered on seven disparate characters, students often struggle to keep track of each character’s whereabouts. Second, many students – especially those majoring in fields outside of the liberal arts – are often daunted by literary analysis. The course’s focus on multiethnic literature compounds their anxiety as they sometimes find the older modes of analysis designed to elucidate European novels to be lacking in their investigation of contemporary multiethnic novels. Finally, many students reject outright Yamashita’s critique of the limitations of the American dream and her focus on immigration, poverty, homelessness, and economics. To these students, Yamashita’s political agenda is too liberal for comfort, and they shut down during discussions where I attempt to provide data backing up many of Yamashita’s claims. Employing mapping in the classroom helps alleviate many of these struggles and engages students in a deeper analysis of the text. Throughout our reading of Tropic of Orange, I encourage students to draw their own maps to help them visualize each characters’ travels and encounters. Class time is also often spent roughly mapping out the character’s positions in each chapter to help us better understand the concepts and themes within the novel. However, teaching literature requires more than just rudimentary understanding of plot, and this is precisely where the detailed maps John and I created provide assistance to students who may not understand the text itself. Utilizing these layered maps in the classroom affords students a toe hold into analysis as well as a different passageway into the text. As Franco Moretti has noted, the maps work “as analytical tool, not metaphor – bringing to light certain relations that would otherwise remain hidden.”13 The maps, quite literally, offer a visual representation of Yamashita’s themes, empowering students who may struggle with literary analysis another avenue to explore the novel’s aims. The constructed map series also allows a deepened discussion of the power of maps to both reveal and obscure reality. For example, one of the first map series we look at in the class is a typical American projection of the world map, where the U.S. and Europe are centered and the global South remains on the bottom or in the periphery. I ask students whether or not this represents the truth of our world, and most readily agree that it does. I then present a world map centered on all seven hundred of the points recorded in Tropic of Orange. Contrary to the first map, the world is shifted to the Pacific Rim, reorganizing the way students understand geography. We first discuss how Yamashita re-centers the world in an attempt to show how interconnected the economy and culture of Los Angeles are with both Asia and Latin America. This discussion gives way to a brief lecture on how literary cartography permits us to view novels anew. We are then able to discuss the potential of maps to offer seemingly truthful reflections even at the same time as they reveal the ideologies of the map maker. This conversation often begins to sway even resistant students who object to Yamashita’s liberal themes. By understanding that the seemingly concrete science of geography is in fact imperfect and subject to individual creeds, beliefs, and dogmas, students begin to open up to the themes elicited in Yamashita’s text. Yet, conversely, because the map series is built

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on hard data from the census bureau, local police precincts, etc., students also often accept the maps and their interpretation of Yamashita’s themes much more readily than they do my own readings of the text or that of their classmates. Teaching multiethnic literature and Yamashita’s novel through these layered maps attends to the impetus of new cultural geographers like Soja, Harvey, and Lefebvre to articulate space and its representations as socially constructed and understood. As Sara Blair argues, these cultural geographic theories offer “powerful new models and vocabularies for revisiting certain definitive (and apparently intractable) problems in American literary studies.”14 The promise then in mapping a fictional account of Los Angeles lies in unveiling the truths the novel posits about the economic, social, and environmental disparities existent in Los Angeles. Yamashita’s transnational focus also attempts to illuminate the realities of migrants as well as clarify the influences migrant and mobile populations have on the countries they transgress/travel through. Rereading texts, especially ethnic texts, via GIS allows us to analyze textual evidence on a geographic scale, thus better understanding the invisible forces that shape our understanding of the correlations between space and events. Allowing multiethnic texts to direct both map-making and meaning-making enables students to compare the imagined reality of the text with extant maps and encourages new ways of viewing national borders, U.S. history, and the current terrain of the United States. In so doing, students are able to more fully excavate and understand counternarratives often produced by writers of color.

The virtual learning community My students’ positive reactions to using layered maps in reading Tropic of Orange coupled with my own continued interest in geographic analysis prompted me to consider ways in which I might engage upper level English majors in the process of literary cartography that I myself had experienced in my summer research with John. However, geographic work in literature remains fraught by the necessity of inter-disciplinary collaboration. In “The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship,” Martyn Jessop explores several factors that limit literary cartography projects including the difficulty of matching cartographic data to the nonlinear time of some texts and, most daunting, the extensive training needed to utilize mapping systems like ArcGIS.15 Jessop, like Piatti et. al., recommends an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach. Yet, how can such an interdisciplinary approach be modeled for undergraduates while ensuring students have the right training and preparation and learning objectives? To overcome this issue, I collaborated with Jamie Mitchem and Zac Miller, both in the Institute for Environmental and Spatial Analysis at the University of North Georgia to create what we termed a “virtual learning community” that married literary analysis with GIS mapmaking. In the virtual learning community, two separate classes – one of English majors and one of majors from the Institute for Environmental and Spatial Analysis (IESA) – engaged in a hands-on collaborative literary cartography project. Coupling these two courses allowed English majors to

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focus on literary analysis at the spatial level, while IESA students in a cartography class were able to concentrate on constructing maps based on a text. We chose to focus on Tropic of Orange again as a database of points was already constructed. Using Tropic of Orange also allowed students in both courses access to a prototype for their own work. Early in the semester, the English majors suggested the types of data/information they would like to see become maps. They then partnered with a group of students in the cartography class who created the maps. By course end, the English majors had constructed conference-length essays based on the maps generated by their peers in the cartography class. In addition to constructing and revising a map for their course project, cartography students gained real-world experience with clients who were often unable to clearly articulate what type of information they were looking for. The “virtual learning community” we created demanded that students become primary investigators and engage in the high-impact practice of undergraduate research. In asking our students to engage in such an unfamiliar and cross-disciplinary field, we asked them to interrogate its parameters and limits, craft new, innovative strategies for working within it, and create exciting projects that test the boundaries of their own singular fields. The set-up of the learning community – where English students work with “experts” in GIS cartography and vice versa – allowed students to engage in modern applications of their home field within another. Students in each field become acquainted with their sister field, broadening the base of their knowledge from their own chosen discipline and further diversifying their skill sets, both of which should favorably impact later employment options. The use of a multiethnic text encouraged students to look at the world from a perspective different from their own and to engage in diversity or global learning, another high impact practice. While the students in the English class may experience this on a deeper level due to class discussion, the cartography students are also exposed to a global perspective through the maps created. By allowing an Asian American text to direct the map-making project, students further understand the ideology inherent in maps and how maps often reflect the dominant culture’s political, economic, and historical view of the world. In addition to the class-long project on Tropic of Orange, we also engaged in a very low-tech approach to literary cartography, one easily replicated in any classroom. In this project, we focused on John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel The Life and Times of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit.16 This early dime novel is considered the first written by a Native American as well as the first written in California. The basic plot of the novel follows the outlaw bandit Joaquin Murieta as he marauds in revenge of his wife’s murder. Ridge’s novel has been widely read either as a parallel to his own Cherokee exile or as Ridge’s attempt to grapple with his own mixed blood identity. Ridge’s text is notable for its inclusion of multiple classes and ethnicities within his construction of the West. It is also highly descriptive and geographical – making it an excellent case study in low-level literary cartography. After reading and analyzing the text with close attention to the racial tensions within it, we used Google maps to lay out Murieta’s travels. Each student took two

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chapters and independently pinpointed each location traversed by Murieta. Interestingly, many of the locations Ridge indicates are still existent or have left traces; for example, we assumed Murphy’s Diggings’ trailer park to be built at the site of Murphy’s Diggings. Students had to make judgement calls on less-identifiable areas, making them more aware of the challenges faced by their fellow cartography classmates. The following class period, we input all of the points the students located into a shared Google map. As a class, we decided that in addition to the ways we had discussed and critiqued Ridge’s novel, perhaps a better way to approach it was as a travelogue, encouraging new ideas and discussions. Students then crafted a threepage response paper describing how the process of mapping reframed their reading and understanding of the text. One enterprising student even went so far as to superimpose our map of Joaquin Murieta’s visited points on top of a map of known gold mines, finding they lined up nearly perfectly. This lead her to conclude Ridge had a much deeper sense of the gold rush than she had previously imagined. Based on the success of this small, low-tech approach to literary cartography, I have since included similar assignments in my American literature classes, further expanding the courses in which I utilize literary cartography. The virtual learning community approach was not without its challenges. Working with literature instead of fact proved very challenging for the cartography students. Collaboration was also a perennial issue; while some groups communicated easily, others experienced frustration in not getting responses quickly and/or misunderstanding the needs of other members. Students in the Literature course expressed frustration over being required to approach literature geographically. For all the frustration, however, student feedback from the English majors was largely positive. One student noted that the literary cartographic approach allowed her to “feel like I’m looking through multiple lenses at one time, which helps with analysis.” Still another student summarized, “Literary analysis no longer only means uncovering symbolism or themes, so much more can exist, and it doesn’t have to be clearly defined in black and white.” In terms of outcomes, within a semester after the course, four out of the eight resulting interdisciplinary undergraduate research projects were presented at either a state or national undergraduate research conference. In addition, the maps devised by the students have since been used to teach the novel in sophomore-level classes. The projects outlined here provide a small sampling of the ways in which literary cartography and GIS mapping can be utilized in the undergraduate classroom. What I hope has become clear in this overview of pedagogical strategies are the ways in which a literary cartographic approach can offer new readings, challenge ideologies, and lead to intensified undergraduate engagement with multiethnic texts. I hold with Peta Mitchell and Jane Stadler that, like geocriticism, literary cartography “enables analysis of locational information in narrative fiction informed by insights from geography as well as literary and cultural studies, it also builds from the premise that such texts intervene in the cultural field and alter the perceptual, ideological, political, and practical orientation of readers.”17 I find this to be doubly true when employing literary cartography to investigate multiethnic or transnational texts;

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reading these texts spatially allows students more nuanced understandings of texts as both fiction and as a reflection of our current transnational realities. While limitations certainly exist in applying literary cartography as a research and pedagogical tool, the benefits of such an approach insist we continue to devise ways to surmount obstacles so that we may offer our students new and productive ways of engaging texts.18

Notes 1 Karen Halttunen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005,” American Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2006): 2. 2 Barbara Piatti, Hans Rudolf Bär, Anne-Kathrin Reuschel, Lorenz Hurni, and William Cartwright, “Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction,” Cartography and Art (Berlin: Springer, 2009), 177. 3 Barbara Piatti and Lorenz Hurni, “Editorial: Cartographies of Fictional Worlds,” Cartographic Journal 48, no. 4 (2011): 218. 4 Martyn Jessop, “The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23, no. 1 (2008): 39. 5 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1900–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 3. 6 Karen Tei Yamashita. Tropic of Orange (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997), 156. 7 “Mapping the Lakes: A Literary GIS,” Lancaster University, accessed September 25, 2014, www.lancaster.ac.uk/mappingthelakes/. 8 Louis Hamilton, “Virtual Cities: GIS as a Tool for the Analysis of Dante’s Commedia,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 13, no. 1 (2012): 116. 9 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 10 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006). 11 David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40. 12 Eric Bulson, Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 12. 13 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 3. 14 Sara Blair, “Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary,” American Literary History 10, no. 3 (1998): 545, accessed March 10, 2014, www.jstor.org/stable/490111. 15 Jessop, “The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities.” 16 John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Times of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977). 17 Peta Mitchell and Jane Stadler, “Redrawing the Map: An Interdisciplinary Geocritical Approach to Australian Cultural Narratives,” in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2011), 58. 18 These pedagogical interventions would not have been possible without the maps created by John Dees, who is currently pursuing a PhD in the Energy & Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, I’d like to thank both Jamie Mitchem and Zac Miller at the University of North Georgia, who collaborated with me on the virtual learning community. Finally, thanks is due to the University of North Georgia for its generous funding of many of these projects.

5 TEACHING LITERARY CARTOGRAPHIES OF RACE, SPACE, PLACE, AND DISPLACEMENT Jessica Maucione

Race is placed in the United States. Places and spaces are racialized. The boundary lines that reserve central places and expansive spaces for white enjoyment and mobility and those that demarcate the confines of marginalized spaces and places are often invisible, but always palpable. The study of contemporary multi-ethnic and multi-racial literatures lends itself to the critique of the racialization of spatial realities – the end-goal of which is the maintenance and reproduction of white supremacy – while also offering students new ways of imagining their own movements through and inhabitance of space and place. A radical pedagogy has the potential not only to debunk the myths of inevitability that encourage complacence with “the way things are,” but also to inspire creative modes of countering and undoing the divisive power dynamics that continue to segregate our world. I teach two courses cross-listed in the English and Women’s and Gender Studies Departments at Gonzaga University – a Jesuit, predominantly white, liberal arts teaching institution whose mission declares a dedication to educating the whole person for the purpose of serving social justice – that approach contemporary literary studies through a triangulation of critical race theory, space and place theory, and radical critical pedagogy praxis: an upper-division course called Race, Place, and Displacement and a lower-division course titled House and Home. In both I begin with readings from Michel Laguerre’s Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things and a discussion about the ways in which some places and spaces are minoritized or ghettoized while others are implicitly reserved for “the majority” and some are marked out as spaces of (often controlled or surveilled) interaction or intersection. In the upper-division course, students engage for two weeks with critical race and space and place theory readings to which the class will return with each subsequent reading of literary texts. This is followed by literary and theoretical pairings for the remaining weeks. In the lower-division course, I pair theoretical readings with literary texts throughout so that students are able to organically make

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connections between literature and theory as the semester unfolds. What connects the readings, discussions, assignments, and activities is the notion that issues related to racism, colonization, and imperialism are place-specific, spatial concerns. Theorized literary analysis leads to space and place-based critiques of and challenges to what bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”1 In owning their own subject locations while mapping multicultural literary cartographies, I along with my students endeavor to co-create a learning environment that will redefine “citizenship” away from complicity with current systems of power and toward a more equitable world. The realities that the social construction of race comprises spatial elements and that the production of American space and place is often racialized is not news to college students, though the opportunity to explore these realities is often radically new. On day one of class, students and I brainstorm together a list of words about place, space, and movement within them whose denotations may be race-neutral but whose connotations have become racialized. These include but are not limited to the following. Place words: ghetto, neighborhood, borough, ‘hood, gated community, hamlet, village, inner-city, urban, suburb, rural, territory; people words: immigrant, alien, migrant, vagrant, émigré, expatriate, vagrant, vagabond, tramp, hobo, itinerant, drifter, homeless person, street person, wanderer, trespasser, traveler, tourist. Seeing these words together on the whiteboard provokes a series of question that will drive our studies forward: How do words describing places and spaces become complicit with false, racialized binaries such as white/black; self/other; safe/dangerous; citizen/intruder, among others? Why are words that are denotatively synonymous separated by racial connotations that not only racialize but also criminalize and class some individuals and groups while seeming to celebrate the mobility and freedom associated with whiteness? Drawing upon specific experiences of people and places from their lives, students begin to form sophisticated answers to these inquiries. Once we critique these things as deliberate maintenance of the status quo, we engage in the triangulated tasks of (1) undoing miseducation about American historical and contemporary realities, (2) unveiling the power dynamics and (3) challenging power-mongers that perpetuate the violent reproduction of hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The relationship between reading literary fiction and empathy has been proven and theorized about, though not fully explained. In several studies conducted in the last few years, reading fictional literature specifically – results were tested against subjects reading popular fiction and nonfiction – has been shown to increase empathic and prosocial behavior.2 My sixteen years teaching literature in college classrooms combined with my students’ reflections upon their own transformative experiences suggest that this increase in empathy may in part arise from the condition in which many readers come to “fiction” – with their guards down. They are being invited to imagine other worlds through characters, narratives, and settings rather than explicitly being told how to think or be. It follows that reading literature by writers whose social positions are minoritized in some way is especially important, for all readers, in the context of an educational praxis bent upon countering local, national,

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and global systems of exclusion, domination, and exploitation. In Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of the Revolution, Peter McLaren argues that “racism constitutes myths, systems of classification, and regimes of discourse that naturalize and legitimize the forced servitude of certain (different) groups whose labor can be exploited for the purpose of accumulation.”3 He recalls, too, that “Che was animated by outrage at the casualness and detachment with which capital destroys human lives – disproportionately the toilers of the world and the dark-skinned populations – and insulates the rich against compassion and accountability.”4 If the naturalization of global capitalism and desensitization to its consequent suffering are the problem, as many current revolutionary pedagogues like McLaren believe, it may be that rigorous studies in contemporary multicultural literature provide some of the best opportunities for the kinds of individual and collective transformations that lay the groundwork for revolution. With these human and pedagogical realities and theories in mind, I try to design courses that allow the literary texts to serve as the teachers. I incorporate short theoretical pieces in the beginning and throughout the semester in order to frame readings and discussions topically. Beginning with a chapter from Michel Laguerre’s Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things serves to illuminate the validity and purpose of reading literature in relation to an inquiry into the interrelated and co-constitutive realities and constructs of race, place, space, and displacement. Laguerre asserts that “[t]he ‘other’ cannot be minoritized unless he/she is situated or located in a social position apart from that of the majority and the space he/she occupies is minoritized by the majority.”5 Laguerre’s use of the verb form of “minority” here is useful as we endeavor to de-naturalize the myths of inevitability that promote an acceptance of the status quo by discouraging us from imagining alternative ways of relating to one another. Indeed, Laguerre critiques the tendency “to take for granted minority status as if it were a nature-given identity for some citizens.”6 Importantly for our preparation to conduct literary analyses of minoritized texts by minoritized writers, Laguerre balances his critique of the “incarcerating mechanism of segregation” with a recognition of minoritized space as “the site where the possible is contemplated.”7 He avers that “[t]he representation of minoritized space by the dominant group may be engineered for the social reproduction of the position of the minority group, while the representation preferred by the minorities themselves may be for the purpose of emancipation.”8 Having read Laguerre alongside Ian F. Haney López’s “The Social Construction of Race” and Benedict Anderson’s chapter, “Patriotism and Racism,” from Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, we embark on our literary journeys. While I worry much over what I am leaving out and I often make changes in order to update my courses or explore new avenues of reaching my pedagogical goals, I will limit my discussion here to a collection of texts and correlative assignments that have worked well in the context of a fifteen-week semester. Because in upper-division courses devoted to specific topics, there are no mandates regarding “coverage,” I have the opportunity to select texts that best lend themselves to my pedagogical aims. I usually teach mostly novels because I think their invitations to

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readers to “extended stays” in fictional worlds foster the possibilities of transformative evolutions in thought as well as behavior. When I teach short stories and poetry, I assign entire collections in order to encourage a similar level of immersion and identification. To begin with the U.S.’s nineteenth poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, is to get off to a bold start. Trethewey’s 2012 collection, Thrall: Poems, interweaves the poet’s meditations on colonial depictions of mixed race, primarily Spanish Casta paintings whose purpose was to name and label “products” of miscegenation, with personal accounts of her relationship with her white father – ones that unveil the ways in which he sees his whiteness as some sort of gift that offsets the “lesser half ” she gets from her black mother. Trethewey’s personalization of the mixed race subjects of the colonizing gaze unveil an important and multi-generationally continuous trajectory of racialized mapping that lies at the heart of American experience and culture. In “Knowledge,” for example, Trethewey describes “The dissection of a young, beautiful woman,” a chalk drawing by J. H. Hasselhorst (1864), as a “delicate wounding” taking place “in a pyramid of light” leading “the object” inevitably toward becoming “a skeleton on a pedestal.”9 The speaker confesses, “the anatomist’s blade opens a place in me,/like a curtain drawn upon a room in which/each learned man is my father.”10 Trethewey laid bare her own identification with the object of dissection at a poetry reading I attended in Athens, Georgia in April 2015. She recounted that she often did poetry readings with her father (also a poet), and once a line of one of his poems she had yet to hear, as she cites in “Knowledge,” declared, “I study/my crossbreed child.”11 It serves my students and I to grapple with the continuities between colonial era painters’ capturing of racialized bodies in hierarchized space and contemporary tensions between race, space, place, displacement, and belonging early in the semester – it introduces, or perhaps reminds us of, the multi-layered complexities of these private and public mappings and intersections. From Trethewey’s collection, we move into Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls, one of her least taught or written about novels. Vacillating between multiple narrators, a male Ojibwe elder familiar from several of her novels since the much-read and taught novel, Tracks, named Nanapush, and a white woman, tangentially, “of means,” named Polly Elizabeth, and finally at the end a female Ojibwe elder, Margaret, Four Souls beautifully illustrates what Sandy Grande deems “the difference between subjectivities produced in and through relationship to land and those produced under and through significations of property.”12 What begins as a revenge story, in which Fleur (another hauntingly familiar character from Erdrich’s other works), walks from her reservation to Minneapolis-St. Paul in order to find and undo the lumber baron who stripped her land in order to build his own monstrously ornate mansion, expands out into a rich narrative interlocking themes of race, discrimination and the white gaze; the nature of vengeance; gender and romance; self-pity, gratitude, and humility; and most brilliantly, the choices people make regarding the various ways of inhabiting space and place. We read Four Souls against Fredrick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and with Anthony Vidler’s, “The Architectural Uncanny” and Leslie Marmon Silko’s essay, “The Land and the

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People are Inseparable” as a way of working to unravel the seeming inevitability of capitalism’s consumption of space as well as beginning to explore and engage counter-mythologies, even alternative inevitabilities. Having done a lot of in-class journaling in response to reading prompts, students write their first formal paper after completing Trethewey’s and Erdrich’s texts – I ask students to choose between explicating one of Trethewey’s poems in relation to a specific topic they identify under the intersection of race, place, and displacement or to do a literary or structural analysis of Erdrich’s novel. At this point in the semester, students sign up for contextual analysis presentations that make them responsible for exploring an aspect of the setting of a day’s reading of a portion of a literary text. Having interrogated these rich texts in conversation with one another mostly through discussion in our classroom in which we move our desks into an intimate circle, small groups (typically of three) conduct research in order to prepare thesis-driven presentations that help uncover some of the environmental realities and textures of the works. This endeavor is very important to the class as community and it goes a long way toward supporting my efforts to avoid the “banking model” of education that would result from my assigning literary fiction and then lecturing as an authority on what is “real” or “true” as depicted or suggested by the texts. I take my place as my students’ student during these full-class-period contextual presentations – and I learn so much more from their sophisticated investigations than I can possibly relate. Following the examples of critical pedagogues, and most especially Paulo Freire, I strive to combat all that is “elitist and authoritarian”13 in right-wing and populist political ideologies, policies, and programs without succumbing to elitism and authoritarianism myself as if I were some kind of omniscient savior. This entails so much more than recognizing that I have a lot to learn from my students. I am constantly “checking in” with my students, asking specific questions and confessing being haunted by the fear that perhaps in some ways I am unwittingly reproducing pieces of the structural hierarchies of race, place, and displacement that I aim to deconstruct. As bell hooks avers, When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow . . . [t]hat empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging our students to take risks.14 The best version of myself as a teacher-scholar recognizes that if I have any valid or valuable “authority,” it arises only from a studious and consistent willingness to take responsibility for failures, change directions or start over when needed, and to recognize myself as only one of the many co-creators of any given course and classroom community. For the sake of space but also because the trajectories of interrogation of these texts vary wildly with the introduction of student-taught sections, I will introduce the additional texts included in one version of my Race, Place, and Displacement

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upper-division course with more brevity here. I always assign one of two texts by Edward P. Jones, either The Known World (his Pulitzer-prize winning novel) or his short story collection, Lost in the City. The Known World offers new ways of thinking about race and place, blackness and the North and the South, past and present, as its characters – some of them, notably, free black slave owners of black slaves – and interlocked narratives span the antebellum South and some immediately postbellum Northern urban locales. Jones’s short story cycle, on the other hand, offers a remapping of Washington D.C. – one that recognizes it as culturally both black and Southern. Jones’s D.C. is not “the Washington they put on postcards,”15 yet the un-romanticized neighborhood-world of the story cycle attracts more than it repels. Although most of the characters are suffering inherited and new losses while facing the constant threat of additional and greater losses, the neighborhood serves (or once served and is remembered) as a place that holds out the possibility of Gemeinschaft within the postmodern world and the age of globalization. For Jones’s characters, the black neighborhood is a dangerous place to wander out of – even by way of institutions that promise class mobility.16 Along with our reading of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey, Jones’s texts give rise to multifarious and productive conversations. We follow Jones with Claudia Rankine’s much lauded, Citizen: An American Lyric. Rankine’s multi-media, constantly revised and renegotiated text (subsequent publications update the text with additional names of black Americans killed by police officers in a poem called, “In Memory Of ”) awakens so much in us with its palpable relevance. We read Mayra Montero’s novel Dancing to Almendra & Fidel Castro “UN Speech 1960” as a way of coming to terms with the race and place politics put forward by the western hemisphere’s only socialist state and by a Cuban-born Puerto Rican novelist and journalist who supports the sovereignty movement that would extradite Puerto Rico from the United States. Next we explore the arbitrariness of borders in Karen Tei Yamashita’s magical realist L.A. novel, Tropic of Orange, that I like to assign with Mike Davis’s prologue to City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and Gloria Anzaldúa’s, “The Homeland, Aztlán/El otro México.” Finally, we end the course with a pairing of Toni Morrison’s novel Home with her own essay, also called “Home” in which she revalues the black communities of the rural American South that in so many mainstream cultural representations are dismissed as culturally backward and theorizes about how, through writing and theoretical/analytical engagement to discover “how to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home” and ultimately, “[h]ow to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling.”17 Morrison’s literary and theoretical works help guide us not so much to resolutions of the inquiries that drive the entire semester as to a broadening and deepening of the parameters of critical inquiry about race and space, place and displacement, and the continua of private-public, self-other that help obliterate the anachronistic binaries that uphold the racialization and spatialization of global era capitalism’s uneven allocation of resources and parsing up of property. Another source of variance between semesters includes current events – I ask students to further contextualize our literary endeavors with short small-group

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presentations on representations of race and place, space, displacement in contemporary popular culture or journalistic fare. We often, formally or informally, respect the need to relate our conversations to contemporary issues or realities. My students at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, for example, have in recent years applied various critical lenses to the Rachel Dolezal fiasco in efforts at understanding this unique intersection of the psychopathologies of white privilege and the social construction of race. Students also write conference-length analytical papers just past mid-term so that we are sure to be developing that skill-set, while my final “exam” varies but is always primarily reflective. My prompt for the final reflection this semester reads as follows: Option 1 Conduct a close reading of one or more primary texts from the syllabus framed by a first-person reflection on the experience of reading or re-reading this text(s) at this point in your college career and your life as well as in this contemporary moment more generally. Option 2 What does it mean to you to read and study texts by diverse writers in connection with race, place, displacement as well as gender, sexuality, and class in the context of your own life and the larger context of current realities? What could it mean for you in the future, personally, professionally, or otherwise? Be as specific as possible. They peer review their reflections, as they do prior formal writings, before submitting them. My great hope is that closing the semester with self-analysis will implicate students and myself in our responsibilities as citizens who have had the privilege to interrogate and unearth the dehumanizing forces that create enormous disparities in connection with the geopolitics of race and class. Recognizing that most people “remain in a state of numbing resignation” (11), Peter McLaren, in his book, Capitalists and Conquerors, calls upon educators to recognize and respond to the need to “expand the pedagogical encounter to consider its own insinuation into globalized social relations of exploitation and to live up to its revolutionary potential of becoming a transnational, gender-balanced, multiracial, anti-imperialist struggle.”18 An intimidating undertaking – and yet I try! (I would like to note here that I have described above my approach to the upperdivision course, Race, Place, and Displacement. For the 100-level introductory literature course, House and Home (whose title does not announce its focus on race and racialization of place and space), I may include many of the same primary texts but with some more accessible framing – fewer theoretical pieces and more secondary materials and assignments that draw upon aspects of American culture with which most students are already familiar.)

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Wide-eyed students occasionally ask me, “how do you do this without getting in trouble?” If I ask them to clarify what they mean by “this,” the answer is some variation of questioning all that they have heretofore been encouraged to revere as quintessentially American. I tell them that I am doing my job as I understand it. The central Jesuit education principle is: question everything. (My religious studies colleagues, for example, are supposed to ask students to question the existence of God.) Gonzaga University’s mission calls us to “foster a mature commitment to dignity of the human person, social justice, diversity, intercultural competence, global engagement, solidarity with the poor and vulnerable, and care for the planet.”19 Contextualizing the study of contemporary American literature means exploring the socio-political and socio-economic realities that contribute to current literary production in the U.S. – neo-liberalism, capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, white supremacy and systemic, institutionalized racism, de facto segregation and uneven distribution of land, resources, and access to basic human rights. As Paulo Freire instructs, “[t]he dominant ideology veils reality; it makes us myopic and prevents us from seeing reality clearly.”20 Becoming educated, therefore, involves the deconstruction of dominant ideologies and the exploration of ideologies deemed “minor.” Because minoritized contemporary writers are creating rich cartographies of the racialization of space and the spatialization of race, getting at these questions through the lenses of critical race theory and space and place theory proves incredibly useful. College students hunger for these kinds of interrogations. My classes are overfull. Students who are part of the white majority and minoritized students alike exclaim, “finally!” Many of them change majors, many dedicate themselves to social justice oriented paths. Others retreat, if temporarily, from the political responsibilities of their new knowledge. In writing this, as I do in my various service-oriented projects at Gonzaga University and beyond, I am advocating for a re-visioning of the classroom as a space for the development of a psycho-sociology of possibility and movement toward alternative ways of participating in the world.

Notes 1 bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009), 8. 2 Julianne Chiaet, “Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy,” Scientific American (October 4, 2013). 3 Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 68. 4 Ibid., 42. 5 Michel Laguerre, Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1999), 8. 6 Ibid., 7. 7 Ibid., 99 & 113. 8 Ibid., 161. 9 Natasha Trethewey, Thrall: Poems (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2012), lns. 27, 12, and 5. 10 Ibid., lns. 28–30. 11 Ibid., lns. 31–32./Natasha Trethewey, “Reading of Thrall: Poems” (Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States conference, April 2015).

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12 Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, 10th anniversary ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004), 3–4 (original italics). 13 Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach, expanded ed. (Boulder: Westview Press), 20. 14 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 21. 15 Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City (New York: Amistad, 1992), 6. 16 Jessica Maucione, “Neighborhood as the New Lost World in Edward P. Jones’s, in Lost in the City.” Edward P. Jones: New Essays, ed. Daniel Davis Wood (Amherst, MA: Whetstone Press, 2011), 76. 17 Toni Morrison, “Home,” in The House that Race Built: Original Essays By Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today, ed. Wahneema Lubiano, reprint ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 5. 18 Peter McClaren, Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy against Empire (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 10. 19 “Mission Statement,” Gonzaga University, www.gonzaga.edu/about/Mission/Mission Statement.asp. 20 Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers, 10.

6 “OUT OF DOORS” Shakespeare and the Forest School movement Lynsey McCulloch

Well, this is the forest of Arden. (Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.4.13)1

Forest School is an innovative pedagogical approach, practiced most regularly within the United Kingdom in early years education, in which learning takes place in an outdoor environment, preferably a woodland setting. Its roots lie in a visit by Bridgwater and Taunton College, England, to Denmark in 1993. Scandinavia has a longstanding history of outdoor learning and the UK has now developed its own approach to Forest School, one that prioritizes outdoor curricula, student selfexploration, and learner-led activities. However, this approach, despite its success with young children, has not been fully exploited by higher education. This chapter considers the value of Forest School methodologies to the teaching of Shakespeare in undergraduate and graduate contexts. It also explores the environmental sources of Shakespeare’s nature writing, both real and imagined, and the relationship of forest settings to the cultural production of his plays. Woodlands provided the base material for writing and printing but they also supplied early modern playhouses with their architectural structures and imaginative spaces. As Vin Nardizzi states, “Shakespeare routinely conscripted the woodenness of the playhouse to perform the role of tree, woods, forest, orchard, and park.”2 Studying Shakespeare’s As You Like It outdoors allows students to engage interrogatively with the relationship between writing and the environment. This chapter considers whether the students’ exposure to rurality affects their reading of the play and whether it can be said to develop their often-nascent environmentalism. Finally, the chapter will assess the importance of outdoor learning to the rapidly growing field of spatial literary studies and ask whether place within literature can ever be taught without spatializing, and mobilizing, the student experience.

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In 1994, the early years department of Bridgwater and Taunton College in Somerset, England, visited Denmark on what was to become a transformative exchange trip. The team of staff and students was exposed to the Scandinavian tradition of outdoor learning, developed in the 1950s and firmly entrenched within the Danish national curriculum for younger children. The Danish schools’ employment of the ‘skog’ – wood or forest – as a teaching environment encouraged a radically different learning experience: “The children set their own agenda, cook, listen to story-telling, sing songs and explore at their own level. They are able to climb very high into the trees on rope ladders and swings, and sit and whittle sticks with knives, alone.”3 This was a flipped “forest” classroom; liberated from the strictures of the schools’ indoor provision, students were able to initiate their own learning. They were encouraged to embrace risk. They were free to withdraw from their fellow pupils. They were able to learn through play, or simply play for its own sake. This emphasis on play and the centrality of the individual child within education has its roots in German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel’s creation of the “kindergarten” in the 1840s. Play would become “the most internationally influential aspect of kindergarten pedagogy”4 but outdoor learning within Northern Europe enshrined Froebel’s theories not only of free play but of “creativity, socialisation and emotional stability.”5 The environment was, of course, key. The team from Bridgwater and Taunton College returned to UK determined to develop their own “Forest School.” The movement has since grown, with support from organizations such as the Forestry Commission, and Forest Schools have become part of early years education across the UK. Educational practitioners within the UK have inevitably adapted Scandinavian traditions in their own development of Forest Schools. Delineating between Forest School and outdoor learning per se can be challenging and the exact parameters of Forest School are still debated but Sara Knight, who has written extensively on Forest School methodologies, suggests the following defining characteristics: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The setting is not the usual one. The Forest School is made as safe as is reasonably possible, in order to facilitate children’s risk-taking. Forest School happens over time. There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. Trust is central. The learning is play-based and, as far as possible, child-initiated and child-led. The blocks and the sessions have beginnings and ends. The staff are trained.6

The desire to make Forest Schools accessible to as many children has possible has led educators to become flexible in their choice of location, but woodlands remain the ideal environments for this style of learning. UK-based practitioners have retained Scandinavian attitudes towards rough weather and towards the importance of celebration as a component of the woodland experience; the demarcated beginnings and ends of sessions that Knight alludes to above often take the form of a campfire

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or feast. Exposure to risk is still encouraged, with the caveat that health and safety concerns are taken seriously. Play and learner-led activities remain pivotal. More importantly perhaps, Forest School promotes experiential learning or learning through doing. While outdoor and experiential learning have been successful with young, and more recently older, children in the UK school system, there remains a reluctance within higher education to engage with such pedagogies. This reluctance can be partly attributed to Forest School’s focus on the practicalities of learning through doing. Experiential learning is not widely practiced within the university sector. It is a mode of education seemingly at odds with the “academic” planes of non-vocational higher education and certainly inimical to the discursiveness of literary studies. Peter Higgins, Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education at the University of Edinburgh, has challenged the narrow application of experiential methods within compulsory education and encourages its wider use: “The fact that not all schooling employs experiential approaches should stimulate us to ask if there are any limits to what we can know experientially.”7 In order to successfully develop Forest School within higher education, we must consider the practical changes necessary for this shift of pedagogical approach. Sara Knight’s final criterion for Forest School above (i.e., that staff are trained) is worth considering carefully. University staff may feel more confident if they are sufficiently qualified. Skills currently taught during Forest School courses range from the practical – using tools safely, constructing shelters, building fires – to an ecological understanding of woodland conservation and the pedagogical techniques of risk-taking, problem solving and developing creativity. Forest School can only grow within higher education if these skills shortages are addressed. Another potential reason for higher education’s lack of engagement with movements such as Forest School is its discomfort with the more evangelical aspects of outdoor learning. Compulsory education within the UK, under the direction of the British Government, takes seriously the health and wellbeing of its pupils. In 2010, the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee published Transforming Education Outside the Classroom. Concerned by a decline in the amount of time children spend outside, the report cites research by Natural England, which found that “the likelihood of a child visiting any green space at all has halved in a generation.”8 Envisaging outdoor learning as a possible solution to issues of both increased urbanization and the transformation of play from an outdoor to an indoor activity, the Committee describes the benefits of learning outside the classroom as “improved engagement and attendance; the development of learning and thinking skills; and the strengthening of personal, social and emotional development (e.g. confidence, self-reliance, and management of risk).”9 An earlier governmental report considered also the positive effects of outdoor learning on pupils suffering poverty and class deprivation: outdoor education has a key role to play in the social inclusion agenda, offering children who may not otherwise have the opportunity the simple chance to experience the countryside, or other parts of our heritage that many others take for granted.10

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Sara Knight has also outlined the use of Forest School as a counter to childhood obesity, disruptive behavior and poor social skills.11 This focus on childhood development beyond the purely academic may ring alarm bells within the university sector. As educators of adults, we may feel no contractual responsibility for our students’ personal development. We may also feel ill-equipped, as subject specialists rather than professional teachers, to offer life lessons to the students on our courses. More personally, we may feel downright uncomfortable engaging with students’ physical and psychological health. But the diminished access to green space that affects children also affects young adults. Evidence is emerging of the holistic benefits of Forest School to adults as well as children.12 The majority of the students I teach at Coventry University are local to the institution and travel in on public transport from cities such as Birmingham, Leicester and Coventry itself. Their familiarity with the countryside of Warwickshire and the West Midlands is limited. The strong emphasis within Forest School on individual responsibility and risk-taking makes it difficult for outdoor learning practitioners to avoid some element of pastoral support in their teaching. Whether university-level educators engage fully with the social rationale for outdoor learning – and its attendant responsibilities – is perhaps a matter for the individual but we need to be aware of this context and its often unspoken assumptions about the value of green space. The organization of Forest School within early years settings may not translate easily into higher education. I first attempted a Forest School exercise whilst undertaking Coventry University’s Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Professional Practice. As part of the course, we were required to develop a “new-to-you” teaching innovation. I focused on outdoor learning and took a group of Year 2 undergraduate students on my “Shakespeare Today” module to the woodlands close to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage near Stratford-upon-Avon. Activities included an orientation exercise in which students were asked to find willow and willow sculptures within the garden and surrounding woodland, in order to consider the relationship between love and the natural world. After a tour of Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, we conducted an outdoor walking discussion (in the rain no less) of the relationship between indoor and outdoor in Shakespeare’s writing. Students were then given disposable cameras and asked to capture a series of Shakespearean nature quotations from the woodland surroundings, considering at the same time their own response to the green space. Finally, we used passages from Macbeth and King Lear to consider trees and current ecological debates more widely. Since this first attempt, I have focused my attention on fewer texts, concentrating mainly on Shakespeare’s As You Like It and attempting a truer Forest School experience by incorporating practical exercises – such as coppicing, weaving, mapping, orienteering and cooking – into the sessions. I have also tried to embed learner-led teaching within my work, allowing students to find their own correlations between the spaces they explore and the places within the text. My experience of teaching As You Like It outdoors – given the play’s vexed relationship with the “forest” environment – gave me the opportunity to interrogate Forest School’s celebration of rurality and its ability to accommodate contradictory views of the countryside. While the experience has proved popular with students and satisfying for myself, it also prompted me to reappraise the philosophy

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of Forest School and consider whether a movement that straightforwardly celebrates the natural world is compatible with Shakespeare’s nature writing. As You Like It, with its long arboreal section, seems an apt text for Forest School. Bruce Boehrer calls it “Shakespeare’s sunniest, most eco-friendly play”13 and this is, of course, attributable to its setting in the Forest of Arden. Juliet Dusinberre, editing the play, remarks on the Forest’s popularity with the public: “Many people across the world who have neither seen nor read As You Like It possess a pool of associations into which the words ‘Forest of Arden’ drop like a pebble, creating concentric ripples.”14 These associations are almost exclusively positive. The Forest of Arden is a space of rural retreat and restoration, a place to contemplate nature and pursue love’s idleness: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird’s throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither! (2.5.1–5) For university students encountering the play for the first time, the Forest of Arden represents a pastoral ideal. Tutors may wish to contextualize the play’s representation of nature by reference to its employment of the “pastoral” mode – a resolutely artificial genre and one more courtly than country in its allegiances. As Louis Montrose rightly notes, “Renaissance pastoral takes the court as its cynosure.”15 Raymond Williams has also shown how early modern adaptations of classical pastorals relied upon a gradual vulgarization of the form. The necessary tension between opposing elements of the natural world – “summer with winter; pleasure with loss; harvest with labour” – is replaced by naïve idealism: “step by step, these living tensions are excised, until there is nothing countervailing, and selected images stand as themselves: not in a living but in an enamelled world.”16 In Williams’ formulation, the Forest of Arden becomes a place of subtle surfaces, of ornamental value. It is a false image of the rural environment. And yet, in my experience of teaching the pastoral and acquainting students with the play’s generic complexity, they remain stubborn in their sentimental attachment to the green space of the play and their love of Arden. Efforts to develop students’ understanding of others aspects of the play, although necessary, are not always helpful in this regard. Their introduction to the text’s playful transvestism, while it importantly highlights the sexual subversion of Rosalind’s male disguise and the gender fluidity of the early modern theatre, only reinforces the restrictive view of Arden as a liberating and life-affirming environment. This is a place in which men and women can freely explore their gender and sexuality. Arthur Quiller-Couch said of the forest world: “Arden having room for all fancy beneath its oaks.”17 The excitement associated with student fieldtrips, coupled with the novelty of Forest School activities, serves to further support the representation of the woodland as a space for exploration and enjoyment.

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Even those critical works that engage directly with As You Like It’s forest setting, and the socio-political role of woodlands in early modern culture, often fortify affirmative attitudes towards green space. Richard Wilson examines the play’s relationship with the mythology of Robin Hood and its connection to the very real enclosure riots of the sixteenth century. In fleeing to the Forest of Arden with many of his courtly entourage, the banished Duke Senior conjures “memories” of legendary (and noble) English outlaws: They say he is already in the Forest of Arden and a many merry men with him, and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentleman flock to him every day and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world. (1.1.109–113) But Duke Senior also walks in the footprints of the dispossessed – those made mobile and homeless by the private appropriation of what was formerly common land. In this context, the woods provide a place of asylum: “A site of sanctuary, the forest was the frontier between common law and feudal rights such as pasturage; thus it was destined to be a battleground between the regulated and market economies, with their warring concepts of legality.”18 Early modern social concerns around vagrancy and illegal assemblage are certainly apparent in As You Like It; Duke Senior’s careless gentlemen are, later in the play, described as a “mighty power” (5.4.154). For Wilson, Arden is a refuge for Shakespeare’s forest squatters, not a focus for their misery and exposure to the elements. And, while I would not wish to suggest that As You Like It contains no sense of a pastoral ideal or welcoming sanctuary, I would argue that Shakespeare’s play accommodates varied, even contesting, views of rurality and that the experiential nature of Forest School – in which students are faced with many of the realities of the rural environment such as exposure to bad weather, challenging terrain or lack of phone signal – helps us to understand these disparate views. But it is not just the sobering realities of the remote countryside that I seek to draw students’ attention to during Forest School sessions. In communicating both the beauty and the hostility of the rural landscape, I stress the importance of imagination in the creation of actual and invented spaces. The indeterminate location of Shakespeare’s play points to a level of inconsistency not always admitted by critics or indeed readers. Shakespeare’s elision of Warwickshire’s Forest of Arden, the Ardennes within Flanders and the imagined French Forest of Ardennes near Bordeaux used by Thomas Lodge in Rosalynde – one of Shakespeare’s sources for the play – suggests that the dramatist did not distinguish easily between real and imagined environments. Robert N. Watson, writing about the play’s title and “the way that ‘liking,’ even in apparently benign forms, necessarily imposes on its objects,”19 recognizes the constructedness of As You Like It’s nostalgia for the natural environment: The familiar craving for a simplifying reunion with the wilderness was focused and magnified at this historical moment by urbanization, capitalism

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and the Protestant Reformation, each of which contributed to anxieties about mediation and the lost sensual past. The multicultural upheaval surrounding Renaissance humanism and colonialism threatened to produce a cognitive crisis by enforcing the recognition that the world is less observed than constructed, less an accessible reality than a manufactured contingency; and empirical science crystallized these epistemological doubts.20 The “liking” that produces the imagined forest is no less potent outside the world of the play and this manufactured affection for woodlands and the wilderness belies anxiety over our inability to see nature as it truly is and to acknowledge its failings. Jeffrey S. Theis describes the forest as a site of “ambivalent contestation”21 and, while Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden speaks of the virtues of rural space, it also – to use A. Stuart Daley’s terms – dispraises the country. As Daley points out, “[a]part from forest or wood, Arden is six times called a ‘desert’”22 and its visitors “contemplate it without enthusiasm.”23 It is not difficult to find criticism of the countryside within the play. Duke Senior feels “the churlish chiding of the winter’s wind” (2.1.7), Orlando notes “the bleak air” (2.6.15) and Touchstone bemoans his forced banishment from the court to the country: “Ay, now am I in Arden, the more fool I! When I was at home I was in a better place” (2.4.14–16). Rosalind and Celia arrive tired and hungry in the Forest of Arden to discover a world of absentee landlords and impoverished shepherds: ROSALIND I prithee, shepherd, if that love or gold Can in this desert place buy entertainment, Bring us where we may rest ourselves and feed. Here’s a young maid with travel much oppressed And faints for succour. CORIN Fair sir, I pity her And wish, for her sake more than for mine own, My fortunes were more able to relieve her. But I am shepherd to another man And do not shear the fleeces that I graze. My master is of churlish disposition And little recks to find the way to heaven By doing deeds of hospitality. Besides, his cote, his flocks and bounds of feed Are now on sale, and at our sheepcote now, By reason of his absence, there is nothing That you will feed on. (2.4.70–85) Despite Corin’s own generous sentiments, this is an environment in which, to quote Linda Woodbridge, “inhospitality is the norm.”24 It is also a commercial and competitive environment. Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, purchases the “cottage,

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pasture and the flock” (2.4.91) at which Corin works and, in making a similar investment, prevents another shepherd, Silvius, from doing so. Rosalind’s male persona allows her to behave in this way but it is also a protective guise. Arden is a place of danger, particularly to unmarried women: Alas, what danger will it be to us Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold. (1.3.105–107) In 2007, a report by greenspace scotland found that while lay perceptions of green space are broadly positive – focusing on fresh air, closer contact with nature and a general sense of wellbeing – there is nevertheless some anxiety relating to personal safety in these locales.25 As You Like It exhibits similar concerns and, without actively endangering students, Forest School activities in remote locations can be used to draw their attention to the various perils of rurality. This does not mean, however, that I employ Forest School to warn students of the dangers of the countryside. I look rather to complicate their readings of these spaces. These new readings can have positive and negative inflections. Alerting students to the rural environment as a potential living space is one way of counterbalancing the dispraise evident in Shakespeare’s writing without reverting to illusions of a pastoral ideal. This ideal is often characterized as a temporary retreat into rurality. As Richard Helgerson states, “the pastoral world is meant to be left behind.”26 Linda Woodbridge, however, points out that – in As You Like It – several major characters choose to remain in Arden.27 Indeed, much of the rhetoric surrounding trees and forests pertains to notions of rootedness and (relative) permanence. When teaching students who typically spend more time in a city than in the country, and for whom a Forest School session represents an excursion, it is important that the woodland as a place to live rather than a place to visit is emphasized. Sara Knight’s stipulation that Forest School should take place over time is important here. Rather than a one-off field trip, Forest School should be a regular occurrence, ideally in the same location for at least a number of weeks. Students can then develop a more nuanced view of these surroundings, often coming into contact with their inhabitants. This helps them, in turn, to recognize the complexity inherent in Shakespeare’s rural imagination. Of course, we must not forget that these are plays written for performance in a city theatre. Vin Nardizzi – in considering the employment of England’s woods as raw material for the building of theatrical spaces – provides a useful corrective to those critics who treat Shakespeare’s forest landscape as real and consistent in its geography. In performance, the “circle of this forest” (5.4.34) to which Orlando refers in As You Like It is not just Arden; it is the theatre itself. This “wooden O”28 was itself implicated in England’s deforestation crisis, with its acute timber shortage and wider fears of an “ecosystemic collapse.”29 For Nardizzi, early modern theatres did not seek to reflect the changing landscape of England’s forests via

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their woodland settings but rather sought to “erase their footprint in an ecological crisis” by presenting “evergreen fantasies”:30 “In enchanting dead wood, actors can re-present, in an uncanny way, the woodland spot where trees were once lumbered to supply carpenters with the materials for erecting the theatre’s frame.”31 Once again, despite some critical acknowledgement of damage, even desolation, within the rural environment beyond the world of the theatre, Shakespeare’s plays continue to underpin sylvan ideals. But we should not forget that Shakespeare’s plays were staged in outdoor playhouses; their ability to represent “evergreen fantasies” was often compromised by environmental factors – the weather, for example. Given the unpredictability of the English climate, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights would surely be ill-advised to produce works dependent on images of eternal summer. In 1933, the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park was established; the reviewer from The Times, in witnessing an outdoor production of As You Like It, seems to be suffering from cultural amnesia: The truth is that any Shakespearian play within four walls is a better thing than it can be in the most charming garden ever made. In the open air acting and production have to reckon with the distracting movement of the wind and the trees and the clouds in the sky, and perhaps it should also be assumed that the mind of the spectator, set to work out of doors, is apt to be expansive rather than precise.32 Early modern theatregoers may not have been able to see trees from their positions in the outdoor theatres but they would certainly have seen clouds in the sky and felt the wind travelling around the circular space. Whether dramatists actively engaged the environmental conditions in outdoor theatres is an area worthy of further research but the reception of plays would certainly have been affected by external factors and the reality of playing outdoors. We have no record of a performance of As You Like It, indoors or outdoors, from the period in which Shakespeare was writing. But the restoration of the Globe Theatre in London tells us much about the conditions in which Shakespeare’s audience often enjoyed his plays. The reality check of this outdoor theatrical experience is replicated in Forest School sessions. Students take pleasure in the plays, not in spite of their woodland surroundings but because of them. Unlike the reviewer for The Times, I would positively encourage an expansive rather than a precise response to the text. Whatever your view on As You Like It’s topographical loyalties, one of its virtues as a text for outdoor learning is its attachment to the outdoors life – whether that means an orchard attached to a country home or a remote forest environment. Orlando’s frustration at the start of the play is not only as a result of his disinheritance but that his brother Oliver “stays me here at home” (1.1.7–8). Oliver’s curt response to Orlando’s growing agitation is “get you in” (1.1.72). His sequestration indoors is a major source of Orlando’s discontent and the basis of Oliver’s authority. Duke Senior, living out of doors in the Forest of Arden, may suffer from rough weather but these are sensual conditions that “feelingly persuade me what I am” (2.1.11).

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Duke Senior’s discovery of “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything” (2.1.16–17) – a natural education in fact – could well become a motto for Shakespearean Forest School. Rosalind’s daily lessons in love with Orlando also point towards a space of learning that doesn’t feel necessarily “educational.” A key component of Forest School is play. The running, digging and climbing activities that materialize the Forest School experience help students appreciate the textures of Shakespeare’s nature writing. These same activities also serve to mobilize the student experience. As students become more familiar with Shakespeare’s interest in rurality, they also become more familiar with their local terrain. Teaching students about environmental issues is implicit rather than explicit within early years outdoor education. Developing Forest School as a component of higher education provision would allow us to incorporate more ecological content within sessions and begin the process of codifying eco-pedagogy. Lynne Bruckner has written positively about teaching Shakespeare and environmentalism side by side in an outdoor space. Teaching writing outdoors also has the advantage of reconciling some of the competing elements of literary theory, in particular tensions in the academy between historicism and presentism: “This is Shakespeare in the ecotone – letting the archival and the presentist collide, even compete to achieve something that matters.”33 I would certainly suggest that there are great and varied benefits to teaching Shakespeare outdoors. It seems to me that educating students in issues of spatiality requires a genuine engagement with place – whether it be the rural or the urban environment. More widely, as the Forestry Commission in the UK suggests, “[a]ccess to green space for learning is not just about ‘the environment’[. . .] there is perceived to be great benefit in teaching most subjects in a natural environment.”34

Notes 1 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2006). All subsequent quotations from the play are from this edition, unless otherwise stated. 2 Vin Nardizzi, “Shakespeare’s Globe and England’s Woods,” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011): 55. 3 Mandi Trout, “All About Forest Schools,” Nursery World Supplement (2004): 16. 4 Ann Taylor Allen, “Children Between Public and Private Worlds: The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany, 1840-Present,” in Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 20. 5 Sara Knight, Forest Schools and Outdoor Learning in the Early Years (London: SAGE, 2009), 5. 6 Ibid., 15–17. 7 Peter Higgins, “Into the Big Wide World,” Journal of Experiential Education 32, no. 1 (2009): 47. 8 House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee, Transforming Education Outside the Classroom, Sixth Report of Session 2009–10 (The House of Commons London: The Stationary Office Limited, 2010), 8. www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ cm200910/cmselect/cmchilsch/418/41802.htm. 9 Ibid., 6. 10 House of Commons Education and Skills Committee, Education Outside the Classroom, Second Report of Session 2004–5 (The House of Commons London: The Stationary Office Limited, 2005), 7. www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/ cmeduski/120/12006.htm.

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11 Knight, Forest Schools, 30–40. 12 Mike Brady, “Addicts and Forest School,” in Forest School for All, ed. Sara Knight (London: SAGE, 2011), 181–193. 13 Bruce Boehrer, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 72. 14 Juliet Dusinberre, “Introduction” to As You Like It (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 50. 15 Louis Adrian Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50, no. 3 (1983): 426. 16 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 18. 17 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, eds. J. Dover Wilson and Arthur T. Quiller-Couch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), xvii. 18 Richard Wilson, “‘Like the Old Robin Hood’: As You Like it and the Enclosure Riots,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1992): 2. 19 Robert N. Watson, “As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness,” in Shakespeare Survey 56: Shakespeare and Comedy, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 79. 20 Ibid. 21 Jeffrey S. Theis, Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009), 89. 22 A. Stuart Daley, “The Dispraise of the Country in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 308. 23 Ibid., 302. 24 Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 261. 25 Karen Croucher, Lindsey Myers, and Jo Bretherton, Greenspace Scotland Research Report: The Links Between Greenspace and Health: A Critical Literature Review (Stirling: Greenspace Scotland, 2007), 3. 26 Richard Helgerson, “The New Poet Presents Himself: Spenser and the Idea of a Literary Career,” PMLA 93, no. 5 (1978): 906. 27 Linda Woodbridge, “Country Matters: As You Like It and the Pastoral-Bashing Impulse,” in Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 190–191. 28 William Shakespeare, “Henry V,” in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., eds. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Prologue 13. 29 Nardizzi, “Shakespeare’s Globe,” 54. 30 Ibid., 55. 31 Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 23. 32 Quoted in Dusinberre, “Introduction” to As You Like It, 66. 33 Lynne Bruckner, “Teaching Shakespeare in the Ecotone,” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, eds. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (New York: Routledge, 2011), 236–237. 34 Paul Tabbush and Liz O’Brien, Health and Well-Being: Trees, Woodlands and Natural Spaces (Edinburgh: Forestry Commission, 2002), 22, www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/health_wellbeing. pdf/$FILE/health_wellbeing.pdf.

7 TEACHING VICTORIAN LITERATURE THROUGH CARTOGRAPHY Susan E. Cook

Maps hold enormous cultural significance, yet they are representative failures: implying spatial precision, they simultaneously signal their own formal limits. Joseph Conrad’s narrator Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1899) knows this. Recalling his youthful drive to explore unmapped lands near the start of the novella, Marlow famously describes how: At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say: When I grow up I will go there . . . there was one yet – the biggest – the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after. True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.1 In a recent course, I started the semester by asking students to discuss this passage. Here Conrad depicts imperial discovery in cartographic terms and, significantly, lends the metaphor heavy rhetorical weight. Before they are “discovered,” spaces are blank, white, and delightful; after discovery they become places of darkness. The darkness is literal, for the spaces are covered with more dark ink as they are mapped, but Conrad’s choice of words compels a more figurative association between such mapping and the bodies that inhabit these spaces as well as connoting the negative aspects of imperialism. The ink of the map signals indictment of the map’s own imperial enterprise. After closely reading the passage, my class analyzed the way Conrad wields the figure of the map to make a more metaphoric, provocative comment about imperialism at the start of his novella. We used this passage, in other words, to consider the way maps allow us to think literally as well as figuratively – and the connections we

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might draw between literal and figurative maps and Victorian fiction. At the same time, we reflected on the limitations of such maps. Rather than simply helping students recognize the broader socio-historical context in which Victorian literature is situated, cartography pushes them to consider how maps provide us with tools for organizing information and for creating new – if at times problematic – spatial realities. A focus on maps, in other words, can give students a contextual, spatial focus on literature of the Victorian period, but it can also ask them to consider the meta-conceptions of space they bring to a text and to a learning environment more broadly. I have employed a focus on maps in texts and in the culture surrounding those texts as a pedagogical tactic in multiple courses, and more recently I made it the centerpiece of one of my department’s upper-division period courses on Victorian literature, a course I subtitled “Victorian Spaces” to reflect the semester’s particular focus on Victorian literature, space, and cartography. Using my experiences teaching with maps more broadly and in this class as a particular case study, this essay illustrates the pedagogical value of cartography, a key topic in spatial literary studies, for the Victorian literature classroom. Since I also want students to understand that cartography is useful for thinking about the organization of information more broadly, I turn to the methodologies of J. Hillis Miller in Topographies and Franco Moretti in Atlas of the European Novel 1800–19002 to help frame our discussions of the way literature interacts with the world, how it participates in the mapping of space, and how mapping is a creative and politically loaded enterprise. Geography is an active force, Franco Moretti writes in Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, “that pervades the literary field,” and that “shapes the narrative structure of the European Novel.”3 Indeed, Moretti here contributes to a larger critical tradition that reads geographic space as central to the development of the novel, and specifically the nineteenth-century novel. Much of this tradition focuses on imperialism: in different contexts, for instance, Benedict Anderson, Ian Watt, and Edward Said4 have aligned the discourse of the (British) novel with imperial nationalism. Drawing a connection between the novel form and imperialism in Culture and Imperialism, for instance, Said writes that “the novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other.”5 In Said’s readings, imperialism is frequently but not always overtly present. Thus novelists such as Rudyard Kipling and Conrad are connected to less apparently “imperialist” contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Henry James: “both the formal characteristics and the contents of all these novelists’ works belong to the same cultural formation, the differences being those of inflection, emphasis, stress.”6 Said’s insistence on the connection between novel, British self-definition, and imperialism illustrates a method for reading authors such as Hardy or Charlotte Brontë – and others who appear uninterested in empire – as inextricably linked to it. These novels show us that imperialism was situated in the heart of the empire. Developing their work in response to, and sometimes as a critique of, this critical conversation, more recent nineteenth-century spatial studies scholars such as Saree Makdisi, Katie Trupener, Margaret Cohen, Carolyn Dever, Sharon Marcus, and Irene Tucker7 have differently addressed the degree to which the Victorians were

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embedded in transnational and/or cosmopolitan discursive structures. At the heart of the Victorians’ understanding of themselves and their national, imperial, and/or cosmopolitan identity lies the map. As Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas note, the founding of the Royal Geographic Society (RGS) in 1830 was a sign of the century’s “overdetermined interest in place, both local and global.”8 The RGS reflected a widespread cultural interest in discovering, knowing, mapping, and incorporating space – and that interest is illustrated but also troubled by Victorian novelists writing throughout the century. Thus, the Victorians’ complex relationship to mapping is one of the focal points in my classes that touch on issues of empire, the nation, Victorian self-definition, or the relationship between country and city. In other words, I bring maps into all of my Victorian classes. I also teach Victorian literature through cartography to solve a problem. At my institution, many students entering the undergraduate classroom have only a general understanding of the Victorians, and many have never been outside the United States. My university is a small, private institution where a sizeable percentage of the students are first generation college students. The English major is a small one, which means that a large number of students in each of my literature courses are non-majors taking the course for general education credit. Even within the English and creative writing student cohorts, Victorian or even British literary studies are generally not primary areas of research interest. My typical student’s understanding of Victorian literature, therefore, tends to be somewhat adrift in both time and space. In an effort to help connect my students to the eras and places of the texts we study, I find myself increasingly relying on visual media such as photographs, paintings, and maps – both actual maps of the period as well as representations of maps in novels. While static maps are ever more archaic to contemporary students more familiar with GPS, it is my experience that maps still resonate as a visual expression of place and spatial relations. Teaching literature alongside maps provides students with a sense of these stories’ locations and how they relate to the world beyond the text. The cartographic discussions in most of my Victorian classes necessarily start with topics such as the expansion of the British Empire across the century, sociological maps of London such as Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, and other spatial renderings of knowledge such as phrenology maps. In class we situate our readings in space: understanding the threat of city crime to the country by tracing the movement of characters in Oliver Twist, for instance, or illustrating the restless wanderings of Jude in Jude the Obscure by mapping his travel around the fictional/factual Wessex countryside. By asking students to engage in cartographic projects of their own through digital character webs and connection maps between texts, my approach connects literal maps to more figurative understandings of how we organize information in time and space, and ultimately asks students to confront the ways in which they themselves map information. A cartographic approach to Victorian literature, in other words, has enriched my students’ experiences of these particular literary texts, deepened their understanding of contexts of those texts, and also modeled a reflective approach to literature and learning more generally.

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Introducing students to literature that may feel geographically and temporally remote through something as identifiable as a map can help to situate the class within the contours of the material. At the same time, I frequently bring cartography into the classroom to deconstruct it. After an introductory lecture about the Victorian expansion of Empire in a nineteenth-century survey course, for instance, we might spend some time analyzing the iconic 1886 Imperial Federation Map of the World by Walter Crane. Discussions typically turn from the colors used in the map, to the Mercator Projection and orientation of Great Britain at the center of the map, to the famous illustrated border tableau featuring colonized people around the globe. Our focus, in other words, quickly moves from the technical aspects of the map as a representation of British-controlled territory across the globe, to an analysis of the map’s rhetorical approach – to the way maps not only depict the world but also illustrate political arguments about that world. We pivot, in short, from a conception of a map as a scientific tool to one of a text making an argument about geography and culture – for geography, as Moretti observes in Atlas of the European Novel, “is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history ‘happens,’ but an active force.”9 And if maps instruct individuals how to be part of a community, they likewise help that community define itself. The Imperial Federation Map demonstrates this force persuasively by positioning the Empire at the heart of the map, communicating Britain’s dominance through the red shading that spans the globe, and relegating other cultures to emblematic curios that frame the image. As cartography has long been a useful pedagogical approach in my Victorian and survey courses, I recently made space, place, and cartography the centerpiece of my Fall 2016 course on “Victorian Spaces.” This course asked students to “consider the ways four Victorian novels – Oliver Twist, Middlemarch, Jude the Obscure, and Heart of Darkness – represent geography; cartography; and rural, urban, and international spaces.” Addressing the process of mapping, historical maps, and the literal and figurative maps featured in literary texts, the course focused on the ways space influences plot and what the representation of spaces in the novels says about the Victorian era more broadly. Throughout the semester we paid particular attention to the settings of each novel as well as the social relationships between characters and between characters and place. We also used the course lens as means of thinking about our own relationships to these texts – our physical and cultural positions visà-vis these canonical novels of nineteenth-century Britain. What relationship do we have, as twenty-first century readers in the American academy, to these canonical fictions from another era and place? Finally, we used the course theme to think more generally about the ways we approach literature, what our minds do when we read, the degree to which that process is spatial, and why that matters. This methodology allowed us to balance the philosophical with the more material. The spatial dimensions of some texts were easier for the students to recognize than others. We began with Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1873),10 which was, as one student put it in an anonymous comment, “a great way to begin the semester because space was concrete. The movement in the text could be mapped on a map of London, and descriptions allowed for a full visual of a space.” Our class

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discussions focused on the characters’ literal movements around London as well as between country and city. An introductory lecture and subsequent discussion about Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City11 gave us a critical vocabulary for understanding movement in the novel in both literal and social or socially transgressive terms, and despite this student’s sense that our attention to space in the novel was concrete, our discussions frequently treated space as a figurative, socially inflected category. Dickens’s lively descriptions – and the precision of his cartographic descriptions in particular – lend themselves to a spatial approach. Students struggled more to connect our course theme to our second text, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872).12 Anderson’s argument that maps give shape to national definition provides a helpful structure for our approach to this text, particularly in conjunction with Miller’s assertion that every novel is “a figurative mapping” – connected as part of a “series” to the “real landscape” it represents.13 The fictional setting of the novel was a challenge, for as one student put it, “Middlemarch, which doesn’t exist in real life but has an assumed location,” made the connection to cartography “a bit more difficult.” Our focus in our discussions of this text was on the microcosm for England that Eliot creates in her fictional town, and our consideration of space turned to the relationships between characters. We developed a character map as a class, and used this to help visualize connections among individuals amidst the social dynamics at play in the novel. Middlemarch enabled students to see ways in which mapping need not involve a literal map, and to begin to see broader applications for mapping as a process of connections. Our focus on space and place became more literal once more with our turn to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895).14 Our discussions of maps and place in relation to this text were some of the richest of the semester, aided in no small part by Hardy’s own Wessex maps. We spent considerable time in class sessions analyzing the Wessex maps and the movement of the characters in Jude across Hardy’s palimpsestic region, which superimposes fictionalized Wessex place names atop a literal map of southwestern England. A student succinctly articulated the relationship between novel and our cartographic approach by noting that “Jude had one dream in mind and with the help of cartography we get to see just how easy or hard it was for Jude to fail or succeed.” Jude never gets very far from his starting place on the map. He circles the countryside throughout the novel, lighting on his goal of Christminster but never actually breaking into the walls of the university long enough to belong there. Our semester finished with a return to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s evocative discussion of the “blank spaces” on the map being filled in and becoming a “place of darkness” bookended our semester and gave us at once another concrete reference to cartography, and yet a more abstract means of interpreting personal discovery. This text also facilitated a discussion of the return to the imperial dimension of mapmaking. Revisiting this text also gave students an opportunity to reassess their initial interpretations from the perspective of a semester’s worth of readings and discussions. In addition to more traditional assignments such as a midterm paper, a final research paper, and an annotated bibliography project, one of the major assignments

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in the course was a group map project. This project incorporated a collaborative digital component in an attempt to bridge the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries without effacing the distinctions between the two, as well as to give students an opportunity to see how the online space affords them a different experience of a text. Throughout the semester and in the context of our discussions of the assigned novels, I introduced several free programs that facilitate spatial thinking and the spatial organization of information, such as Google Tour Builder, Google Maps, Placing Literature, Voyant, and Prezi. I dedicated class time to letting the students investigate each of these programs in the context of the novel we were reading at that point in the semester. For instance, during our fourth of seven discussions of Oliver Twist and following our discussion of Williams, I asked students to identify a passage in the novel that shows movement between country and city. I then introduced the class to Google Tour Builder, and asked them to pair up and track one of their passages using this program. For the final project, students were put into groups of three and instructed to create digital map of some aspect of one of the novels. Students then wrote a collaborative rationale for their map – justifying their design choices, the reading of the novel offered by this map, and the significance of this digital platform for developing a more comprehensive understanding of the novel – and presented the project on the final day of the semester. Students responded positively to this assignment. Some appreciated being introduced to new web platforms, while others enjoyed the different format of the project. The group structure worked well for most. Students reported that everyone contributed equally, and some worked face-to-face as well as virtually. Several groups mapped character movement using Tour Builder, though one group adopted more of an abstract approach by showing thematic connections using Prezi. Both platforms allowed the groups to track movement across space and experiment with a multimedia approach to literature by linking to other content on the web. One student wrote that they “enjoyed looking at literature in a different way” through the project. Reactions to the project seem to mirror reactions to the course focus overall. As one student put it, “taking this course helped me to realize that cartography and literature are very closely related. What is a story, but a mapping of the characters? It’s a map of their journeys, their relations, anything, really.” Another noted, “Our class duplicated how mapping throughout a story creates a parallel story in itself.” These quotes encapsulate the connections I asked my class to draw not only between novel and cartography, but also between cartographic approaches to literature and mapping as a broader concept for the way we organize knowledge and understand our place in the world. A cartographic focus in the literature classroom can enable students to think about the ways we cognitively map knowledge all the time, including in our own learning. Throughout the semester, I asked students to reflect in different ways on their own participation, as readers, in our course material – to think about the ways they were relating to the texts and how these relations could be mapped. A discussion of narratology and the implied reader gave us an opportunity to discuss the role of the reader in the textual equation. A professed difficulty with the length of some

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of our texts presented an opportunity to ask students to reflect on their embodied experiences while reading and to try, as an experiment, reading for an hour without looking at any other media or moving from their seat – and to write a reflection about the experience and its implications for our twenty-first century attention spans. By asking students repeatedly to think critically about their positions within the reading process through reflection assignments, I found they went into their final projects with a substantial amount of thoughtfulness about their relationship to the material. One student commented, for instance, that the group project “made us connect mapping a storyline in our own words and describe the journey of our character.” Another noted that the course focus “changed the way I read novels,” while another still indicated that the course focus on place, space, and cartography changed the way they think about the organization of information more broadly, because they were asked to “consider literature on different levels.” In the first instance, our focus on cartography in “Victorian Spaces” gave students a multimedia means of understanding the broader context of the literature we were discussing. In the process, the course asked students to consider their own participation, as readers, in the communication circuit of that literature. A focus on cartography enables students to recognize, on the one hand, the distance between us and the times and places of the texts we read, and to see, on the other, our important role in the interpretation of those texts and the ways texts can shape our own worlds. Much like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, students are compelled, through a spatial approach to literature, to explore the blank spaces. A spatial approach to literature can and does mobilize a thrill of interpretive discovery. Yet this line of inquiry into literature’s spatial registers also raises significant questions. This interpretive discovery mobilized by cartography can be tinged with a dark warning, for just as the places in Hardy’s Wessex are, as the novelist pleaded with fans, “only suggested by those real ones given – as they are not literally portraits of such,” so must all fictional places be understood to stand at a disjunction from the world.15 Without an awareness of fiction as such – or of the Victorians as a culture forever partially unmapable – we risk an imperial move, transforming the representative map into a place of darkness. We must teach proximity and distance simultaneously, ultimately showing our students that perhaps the most significant map is the map of connections they create for themselves. This is a map that is forever being created and challenged.

Notes 1 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. 1899, 1902, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988), 8. 2 J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1998). 3 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, 3, 8. Original emphasis. 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Los Angeles: University California Press, 1957); and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). 5 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 70–71.

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6 Ibid., 75. 7 Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, eds., The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sharon Marcus, “Same Difference? Transnationalism, Comparative Literature, and Victorian Studies,” Forum on Transnationalism. Victorian Studies 45, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 677–686; and Irene Tucker, “International Whiggery,” Forum on Transnationalism. Victorian Studies 45, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 687–697. 8 Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas, eds., Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space From the Victorian Age to the American Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 2. 9 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, 3. 10 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Philip Horne (New York: Penguin, 2002). 11 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 12 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 13 Miller, Topographies, 19. 14 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor (New York: Penguin, 1998). 15 Timothy O’Sullivan, Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography (London: Macmillan, 1975), 343.

8 THINKING GEOCRITICALLY Teaching Canadian literature in Treaty 6 territory Sarah Wylie Krotz

The spaces of the Canadian classroom The University of Alberta, where I teach Canadian literature, is situated in the territory of Treaty 6. It has become common across the university to acknowledge this treaty in the first meeting of a class (as it is across Canada to acknowledge other treaties and unceded Indigenous land). Many also acknowledge the Métis who were excluded from the treaty but who inhabited this area – farming lands around where the university now sits – at the time that the treaty was negotiated. When we acknowledge Treaty, Indigenous, and Métis territory, we begin by considering the space that our classroom occupies: the space that we inhabit as we meet over the duration of the term, and as we move between classrooms, libraries, and our neighbourhoods and homes. At the University of Alberta, many of our classrooms look out to the North Saskatchewan River, the banks of which were long-time meeting grounds of Cree, Blackfoot, Saulteaux, Nakoda Sioux, and Dene peoples, eventually joined by the Métis, British and French fur traders, and eventually settlers. Treaty 6, originally negotiated in 1876 between the colonial government and several first nations mentioned here, is the reason we share this land. The treaty is the reason I teach where I teach, and why some of my students come from Enoch, a reserve west of Edmonton to which many Papaschase Cree were forced to relocate by an adhesion to the treaty a few years later. We dwell in the spaces that it created. Acknowledging this treaty focuses our attention on the spatiality not just of the classroom, but also of the texts that we study within it. In this essay, I consider the relationship between the two, and how that relationship is shaping my teaching of early Canadian literature and colonization in particular. I explore how thinking about treaty space, literary geography, and geocriticism as mutually informing methods of spatial analysis can help to open up underappreciated aesthetic and political dimensions of early Canadian writing.

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Not only do the spaces and locations of our classrooms inflect our interpretations of literary texts, but our classrooms are also “shaped – territorialized, de-territorialized, re-territorialized – by the texts we read in them.”1 Literary geography turns our critical attention to these spatializing effects, prompting us to think about how writers worked like cartographers to inscribe land and orient readers within it in particular ways.2 Geocriticism, as theorized by Bertrand Westphal in his book by that title,3 complicates the work of literary geography by emphasizing other ways of seeing and mapping the land that must become part of our analysis if we are to attend properly to a text’s geographical context. Like Westphal’s geocritical method, the treaty acknowledgment draws attention to the places that we, and our literatures, inhabit, and reminds us that these places are complex assemblages of stories and meanings. My research and teaching are informed in ever-deepening ways by these spatial approaches to literary study. This essay outlines how I bring them together when I teach early Canadian literature in particular. While literary geography elucidates the powerful literary-cartographic claims settlers made, geocriticism decenters dominant narratives of place and space in favor of a stratigraphic vision in which no story is ever the only one. This decentering can, I suggest, occur even within a single text, as signs of multi-focal meaning and habitation point to other ways of seeing the place itself, not just as colonized territory, but as shared space.

The spatiality of early Canadian literature For me, the study and teaching of Canadian literature has always been a geographical exercise. Any national rubric is an inherently spatializing one: to think about “Canadian literature” – or any other national literature, for that matter – is to think about literature as it relates to, or at least has been framed by, a geopolitical entity. Anthologies emphasize this geopolitical frame to varying degrees – some hardly at all, beyond a tacit embrace of the nation as a category that legitimates a literary canon. Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars’ two-volume anthology Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts, published in 2009, shifted the focus from a national canon of authors and texts to a clearly emplaced and broadly conceived literary culture.4 Their historical introductions, maps, and photographs highlight the relationships among geography, history, and literature, opening up fertile terrain for spatial approaches that draw connections between literary culture and the referential spaces that Canadians inhabit. Furthermore, one need not be overly familiar with “Canlit” to know that it is characterized by an obsession with landscape, space, and place that makes it a fertile ground for spatial approaches. Canada’s colonial writing is a case in point: from topographical long poems, to explorer narratives, to settler guides, the dominant forms of this period are spatial as well as narrative. Expressly concerned with orienting readers in unfamiliar terrain, writers not only described the land, but endeavoured to verbally map it.5 Consider, for example, these lines from Adam Hood Burwell’s Talbot Road: A Poem, published in 1818: A Town, St. Thomas’, is in Yarmouth laid, On a bold bank by Kettle River, made,

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O’erlooking the broad vale which ‘neath it lies A striking picture in the trav’ler’s eyes. Southwold succeeds, in which the North Branch Road Turns off to Westminster, as has been show’d: Next Dunwich, ending Talbot Road the East, From whence it is denominated West: Next Aldbro’-now the reader must be sent From Middlesex into the County Kent: Then follows Orford; Orford, Howard join, Harwich and Raleigh range along the line; Tilb’ry, and Romney East and West, which past, Mersea remains, on Talbot Road the last. Mersea’s in Essex County. Now to treat Of all their merits would be to repeat, The praise of towns first named: – ’Tis understood They all are beautiful, they all are good; They all excite our wonder, and our tongue Should not be silent ‘till their worth be sung.6 These are far from the most inspiring or memorable lines of verse a student will read during their English degree. As literary geographers, we can connect the drier, less obviously “literary” features of colonial texts (not only catalogues of place names like this one, but also their detailed inventories of natural history) to a cartographic imagination as much as, if not more than, a literary one. Passages such as this one might appear to be devoid of narrative interest, but they give students much to think about spatially. Inspired by his surveyor brother, Mahlon, who laid out many sections of the famous Talbot Settlement in what is now Southwestern Ontario, Burwell conjures a landscape that is in the midst of being reshaped by the diagrammatic order of the land survey as well as the growing network of roads. His literary-cartographic contribution to this order emerges in this skeletal list of toponyms that march down the page in Heroic Couplets, the perfect poetic analog, one might say, to the symmetrical gridded space of the road and the surveyed agricultural tracts. The cartographic aesthetics become even clearer when the poem is compared to historical maps of the Talbot Road, which illustrate the reduction of places to points, “all” equally “beautiful” and “good,” under the cartographer’s abstracting schema. The territorial implications of his spatial poetics come clearer when the poem is read alongside essays such as the geographer J. B. Harley’s “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” which clarifies how cartography shapes and manipulates rather than straightforwardly reflecting the world, and the literary scholar D. M. R. Bentley’s “Tokens of Being There: Land Deeds and Demarcations,” which shows how early Canadian poets rearticulated the legal and conceptual frameworks that legitimized colonial acquisition of territory.7 These essays clarify the power of cartography of all kinds in facilitating imaginative as well as physical habitation for Anglo-colonial settlers in particular. Prompted to think about the British origins of the place names

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that Burwell catalogues, and who implicitly belongs there, students can readily see how, from the geometrical order to the implicit community that the poet celebrates, this passage enacts a cartographic process of colonial overwriting that worked to conceal Indigenous and French names that had already marked the area. Bringing this lesson back to the space of our classroom, Burwell’s place names find an intriguing parallel in the name of Edmonton, this city thousands of miles from Ontario (and farther still from the suburb of London, England after which it is named), where we read his poem. Talbot Road is just one example of many literary-cartographic texts from this period that re-imagined the meaning of a place in order to orient settlers in unfamiliar terrain. It is not hard to build a syllabus out of texts that bring concrete form to Edward Said’s observation, in Culture and Imperialism, that “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”8 Acknowledging Treaty 6 puts the onus on us, I think, to consider the extent to which this literature is part of the particular struggle over geography that the treaty represents. The treaty points to a history of land acquisition and theft that resulted in mass displacements of Indigenous and Métis communities across Canada under the reserve system and scrip. Thinking about writers as mapmakers, students can connect these displacements and dispossessions on the ground with what Bentley refers to as the “Englishing” of the country in and through its colonial literature.9 Read alongside the many images that appear to sweep Indigenous people from the land, whether banishing them to “far distant wilds” (as the younger Oliver Goldsmith does in his poem The Rising Village) or “swept on to the cataract of oblivion,” as W. D. Lighthall put it in his introduction to Songs of the Great Dominion,10 students can easily see how these processes of overwriting enacted, in literary form, the “extinguish[ing]” of Indian claims that the written text of the treaty describes.11

Treaty and the geocritical method While it is important to recognize this literature’s complicity in the erasure of Indigenous presence on the land in the process of being claimed by settlers, this is not the only responsibility that the treaty acknowledgement carries. As both historical and present-day understandings of treaty underscore, the spaces of colonial Canada were far more complex than these tropes of erasure and displacement suggest. The treaty reminds us to acknowledge not only the many forms of colonial violence and its victims, but also the nation-to-nation negotiations and understandings of shared space that lie behind the treaty. Signifying the confluence of peoples, languages, histories, and meanings in this place, the treaty points not to a single story of colonial conquest and habitation, but rather to multiple stories that configure and reconfigure the land as a place of habitation, travel, meeting, exchange, economy, ceremony, living, and dying. The many Nehiyaw (Cree) treaty teachings underscore this aspect of the treaty, which draws our attention back to the specificity of this

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place and its peoples and histories. If we acknowledge and honour the treaty in Edmonton, we begin to think about the other names that give definition to this place, such as Amiskwacîwâskahikan, or Beaver Hills House. Accordingly, teaching Canadian literature in treaty territory requires not just literary geography, but a specifically geocritical approach. What is most compelling to me about geocriticism is the way in which it at once acknowledges and unsettles the power that a single text, no matter how forcefully it might command our imaginations, can claim to define a particular place. For the geocritic, the place itself becomes “the ultimate object of critical attention.”12 That is, rather than focusing on a single text, author, genre, or literary movement, the geocritic seeks to “come closer to the essential identity” of the place across which myriad texts, diverse in their forms, histories, and objectives, converge.13 A single story is but one thread in a tangle of representations and interpretations of the place to which the geocritic attends. In Canada, where so many places and the stories we tell about them remain conflicted, contested, burdened with colonial histories and the legacies of failed relationships, where our spaces are all shared, not the only story has profound implications for our geographical imaginaries as well as for our literary ones. As Westphal outlines it, a proper geocritical practice would entail a far more narrowly focused and literary deep mapping than my own “Early Canadian literature and Colonization” survey course, with its expansive geographical parameters, and narrow historical ones, can accommodate. Geocriticism finds its expression in courses that are locally defined, such as one that my fellow Canadianist Manina Jones teaches about literary representations of London, Ontario (which grew out of the Talbot Settlement).14 “Geocritical analysis,” Westphal explains, “involves the confrontation of several optics that correct, nourish, and mutually enrich each other. Writing of space may always be singular, but the geocritical representation emerges from a spectrum of individual representations as rich and varied as possible”; “multifocalization,” he goes on to underscore, its “chief characteristic.”15 A geocritical impulse lies behind my emphasis on writers working in the same geographical area, such as Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill (two sisters who emigrated from Suffolk to Douro Township in what is now Ontario in the early 1830s), and George Copway (a Mississauga Ojibwe writer from the same Canadian region who also went by the name Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh, “he who stands forever”). Reading texts by these three writers alongside one another, students can begin to build a kaleidoscopic view of a landscape characterized by turns as terrifying (Moodie), alive with natural history (Traill), and spiritually and physically sustaining (Copway); they see it described as devoid of cultural history (Traill), and rich with cultural history (Copway); and they encounter it through the dynamics of settler possession (Moodie and Traill) and of Indigenous dispossession (Copway) that complicate each of these meanings.16 We consider these texts not only as individual literary works, but also as overlapping perspectives that start to fill in the heterogeneous contours of space that is, in Westphal’s words, polysensorial, multifocal, and stratigraphic in its significance.17

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As Tally observes, it is virtually impossible to complete a geocritical project, and the three texts above hardly make a complete picture of a region that, while it had few written texts during this period, was certainly alive with stories. I am also interested, however, in how a geocritical method shifts the relation between individual authors and the places about which they write in ways that affect how we interpret not just clusters of texts, but individual ones as well. Literature, after all, is an art form that “appreciate[s] the complexity, flexibility, and ambiguity of a mobile and dynamic perspective that makes space an entity with a thousand faces.”18 In my early Canadian literature classroom, I have found it productive to think about how rarely a single text is ever truly “singular”: while it may well aim to be so, it rarely, if ever, is. A case in point is Roughing It in the Bush. Published in 1852 and now Canada’s most famous settler narrative, Roughing It dramatizes Moodie’s own confrontation with a multiplicity of meanings that the so-called terra nullius already possessed when she arrived with her husband to Upper Canada in 1832. As her sketches amply reveal, both the cleared farm they purchased near Cobourg, and then the land grant that they cleared themselves, which took them deeper into the “bush” of Douro Township, already held considerable significance to the neighbours, squatters, and Mississauga Ojibwe families who inhabited them. The reader learns of this significance through the voices of other characters who, as John Thurston has observed, “[s]peak [. . .] through her,” but “have a potency she cannot domesticate” (145). These voices give Moodie’s sketches a polyphonic quality that combines a multiplicity of perspectives, many of which conflict with her own. Most important for the geocritic, they point to the plural significance of a place that at that time had no accumulation of written literature of the kind that Westphal’s geocritical method seems to require. Moodie records perspectives as diverse as Old Mrs. Harris’s sorrowful tale of her family’s “long and bitter journey” from the United States into Canada, where all but one of her children now lie buried; her racist neighbour’s account of the accidental killing of a black man at a charivari (a marriage custom imported from Quebec); a gentle but mentally ill friend’s love of nature that all but forestalls his addiction, depression and eventual suicide; a poor Irish dragoon’s gleeful song of “indepindence” [sic]; and the Mississaugas’ tall tales of “wild beasts and rattlesnakes” meant to keep settlers from further encroaching on their land.19 Moodie’s own mercurial impressions of the place she was required by “stern necessity” to inhabit become entangled with the motley voices of Irish and Yankee, upper and lower class, native and newcomer, the place itself coming into focus only as a shifting and “navicular” product of all of them (and many more besides).20 The disorderly effect of this entangling of voices and stories discursively parallels the confluence of people on the land that compromises Moodie’s ability to lay claim to, or even fully orient herself in, the so-called “New World.” This is a place in which squatters override legal ownership and neighbours walk into her homes uninvited. Most important for thinking about treaty space, though, is her observation that the Mississauga, whom she fondly regards as her “Indian friends,” continue to “follow their old occupation[s]” on lands now the property of settlers.21

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Moodie’s words find echoes throughout the numbered treaties, including Treaty 6, which stipulates, “the . . . Indians, shall have right to pursue their avocations of hunting and fishing throughout the tract surrendered.”22 Although this stipulation does not appear in the text of the Williams Treaties that opened up her area to settlers in 1818, Moodie notes that the forests and meadows, increasingly endangered by land-clearing, supply them with wampum-grass, birchbark for canoes, as well as “game, fish, and fruit”; she notes that they have named every “flower that blooms in the wilderness, [. . .] bird that cuts the air with its wings, [. . .] beast that roams the wood, [. . .] fish that stems the water, [and] minute insect that sports in the sunbeams,” and possess intimate knowledge of the contours of “every lake and river” in Ontario.23 Although Moodie does not seem to have met George Copway, who was a teenager when she moved to the area, these are his people, and it is their knowledge that marks her the most clearly as a newcomer with a lot to learn about this place. Her view of this place and its people is limited by language barriers and cultural differences that curtail her Mississauga friends’ willingness to share all of their songs and stories with her; nonetheless, she points to their existence in ways that prompt readers to acknowledge their presence and to imagine how they are connected to the geographical knowledge and habitation that Copway elaborates in his autobiographical and historical writings. Moodie’s multifocal and polyphonic attention to this place registers the extent to which its “essential identity,” as Westphal would later describe it,24 does not deliver an easy sense of belonging or orientation; rather, it is a decentering experience of place more akin to getting lost. This fragmentary sense of space compromises her own literary-cartographic appropriation of a land that she also names and circumscribes in various ways throughout her sketches. Moving us from the apparently stable, orienting power of cartography (literary or otherwise) to the shifting, messy, and unstable nature of places themselves, geocriticism is at once orienting and disorienting. The writer/reader/scholar/student floats, boat-like, on its ever-moving surface through which other perspectives shimmer, making and remaking the place. This feeling of disorientation, or of perpetual reorientation, is important for thinking about colonial writing in ways that are not just spatially, but also ethically, engaged. Like a treaty acknowledgement (which is itself only a fragmentary introduction of stratigraphic meaning into the space we occupy), the glimpses that Moodie provides of other stories and perspectives keep us from succumbing too easily to oversimplifying tropes of colonial overwriting. As I attempt to show my students, the spatiality of colonial texts is rarely as singular and homogenizing as Adam Hood Burwell’s poetic view of the Talbot Settlement, which he imagined was replacing a pristine and uninhabited wilderness (although even here, his “swarming settlers” introduce a potentially unnerving heterogeneity into the terra nullius, making it possible for the reader to begin to imagine a multifocal, polysensorial, and stratigraphic creation of place).25 This feeling of disorientation is, to me, a key feature of the “common space” that, according to Westphal, the geocritic helps to “determine.” Although he does not have Canada’s colonial and postcolonial landscapes in mind, his terms resonate

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with those of Roger Epp, who argues in We Are All Treaty People that treaties create and sustain “common ground” defined by “obligations of memory and relationship on all sides.”26 The geocritical conception of place as a “crossroads of distinct representations” also resembles the Nishinaabeg scholar Willie Ermine’s idea of “ethical space,” which he conceives as a “meeting place [. . .] produced by contrasting perspectives of the world” instead of an homogenizing order.27 For many Nehiyaw living across the prairies, treaties are covenants promising “miyowicehtowin (good relations) and witaskiwin (living together on the land).”28 As Harold Johnson underscores, according to Cree law, the treaty makes us all into relatives.29 We can think about these relations as literary ones too: relations between stories forged not through genealogies of literary histories and movements, but by virtue of shared space. Geocritical methods thus lead us away from the pervasive tropes of empty space, terra nullius, and trackless wilderness that erased the presence of Indigenous people and suggested that the land was an empty container, devoid of meaning until settlers arrived to inscribe it. To read geocritically is to give agency to the stories that can be glimpsed through the colonial text-map, and to read more than one side of the struggle over geography that occurred when settlers began to reimagine the spaces and places of what is now Canada. It is thus to disturb the fantasy and expose the reality of negotiation, potential conflict, and shared space that lay behind all colonial maps.

Notes 1 Manina Jones builds on both Westphal and Robert T. Tally in this observation. Manina Jones and Sarah Krotz, “Words, Maps, Deeds: A Dialogue on Emplaced Poetics in the Canlit Classroom” (presentation, Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, Calgary, AB, May 28–31, 2016). See also Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013), 140–143. 2 See Tally, Spatiality, 44–111. 3 Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4 In my early Canadian literature course I assign Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars, eds., Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts, vol. I (Toronto: Pearson Longman, 2009). 5 I explore these ideas more fully in my forthcoming book, Mapping With Words: AngloCanadian Literary Cartographies, 1789–1916 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). 6 Adam Hood Burwell, Talbot Road: A Poem, ed. Michael Williams, introduction by D. M. R. Bentley (London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1991), 509–528. 7 See J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 51–82; and D. M. R. Bentley, Mnemographia Canadensis: Essays on Memory, Community, and Environment in Canada, vol. 1 “Muse and Recall” (London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1999), 47–92. 8 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 7. 9 D. M. R. Bentley, The Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690–1990 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992), 125. 10 Oliver Goldsmith, “The Rising Village,” in Moss and Sugars, Canadian Literature in English, 165; William Douw Lighthall, “Introduction” to Songs of the Great Dominion:Voices From the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada, selected and edited by William Douw Lighthall (London: W. Scott, 1889), xxi. 11 “Treaty No. 6,” Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, accessed April 21, 2017, www. aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100028710/1100100028783.

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Westphal, Geocriticism, 111. Ibid., 114. Jones and Krotz, “Words, Maps, Deeds.” Ibid., 113, 122. See in particular Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, ed. Michael A. Peterman (New York: Norton, 2007); Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters From the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, Illustrative of the Domestic Economy of British America, ed. David Staines (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989); and George Copway, The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation, afterward by Shelley Hulan (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2014); or the selections from these authors in Moss and Sugars, Canadian Literature. Westphal, Geocriticism, 137. Ibid., 121. Moodie, Roughing It, 93, 89, 141, 115–128, 236, 228. Ibid., 14; Westphal, Geocriticism, 145. Moodie, Roughing It, 187. “Treaty No. 6.” Ibid., 228, 201, 187. Westphal, Geocriticism, 114. Burwell, Talbot Road, 442. Roger Epp, We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays (Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2008), 141. I first encountered Ermine’s idea in an essay by the literary scholar Daniel Coleman that, in another version of geocritical thinking, imagines why a conversation between George Copway and Catharine Parr Traill never took place. See Coleman “Grappling With Respect: Copway and Traill in a Conversation That Never Took Place,” English Studies in Canada 39, no. 2–3 (2013): 67. Epp, We Are All Treaty People, 141. Harold Johnson, Two Families: Treaties and Government (Saskatoon, SK: Purich Publishing, 2007), 13.

PART II

Representing space and place

9 PANORAMIC PERSPECTIVES AND CITY RAMBLES Teaching literary urban studies Lieven Ameel

The city hung in my window . . . In an early scene in Sylvia Plath’s The Ball Jar (1971/1988), the protagonist has returned to her hotel room in New York after a confusing outing in the city. Unable to fully open her hotel window on the seventeenth floor, Esther Greenwood tries to get a view of the city where she has only recently arrived: By standing at the left side of the window and laying my cheek to the woodwork, I could see downtown to where the UN balanced itself in the dark, like a weird green Martian honeycomb. I could see the moving red and white lights along the drive and the lights of the bridges whose names I didn’t know. The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.1 The view from above of the city, in this quote, is instructive of several of the effects achieved by the panorama in a city novel. It conveys and thematizes the protagonist’s uneasiness with the city, her literal inability to hear its sounds, the distance she feels between herself and her surroundings. At the same time, there is also paradoxically a connection since the view of the city resonates with her inner feelings: the total lack of noise in the panorama is literally the protagonist’s own silence. Distance seems also concomitant with a particular kind of figurative language, which

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translates concrete spatial features in metaphorical terms, as with “green Martian honeycomb” of the UN building. Crucial to the panorama is the explicit way in which the perspective is framed – in this case, the extent to which the view is limited, obstructed, and partly closed to the protagonist. In a novel pregnant with forced enclosure, the inability to escape social and moral restrictions is made tangible in the failure to fully open the window, the difficulty, in “laying my cheek to the woodwork” to gain an unrestricted meaninggiving perspective. In drawing attention to its framing, the panorama underlines the artificiality of the view. To Esther, the city appears as a two-dimensional apparition, “flat as a poster.” Artificial to the protagonist, it alerts the reader to the broader constructed nature of the narration: the fact that the view the reader gets of the storyworld and the city within it is carefully framed and composed. In the city novel, the panorama is a narrative strategy of the first order, often juxtaposed with and complemented by the city walk. In The Bell Jar, the panorama comes immediately after a reference to the protagonist’s long walk back to her hotel, a walk that is presented as much less problematic for the protagonist than the attempt to gain an overview of the city: as the narrator confidently notes: “walking has never fazed me.”2 Yet the reader learns that she has used a map – a bird’s-eye view of sorts – for her orientation, one indication that a high vantage point and the experience on the street are complementary rather than oppositional, and that the experience of the city oscillates between these two perspectives.

The panorama and the city walker The city walker in literature, with its roots in the contested figure of the flâneur,3 and the panorama, with its intimation of a totalization of space,4 constitute together a crucial pair of hermeneutic approaches to space in the city novel and to the complex relationship between spatial surroundings, the protagonist, and their development. In this article, they will be taken as key conceptualizations in teaching literary urban studies. I will start out by examining some of the critical secondary literature pertinent to these conceptualizations. These will be complemented by a discussion of practical teaching assignments aimed to enable students to apply theoretical concepts from urban and literary studies to their own experiences of the urban environment, and to take the classroom material into the city. The assignments and readings outlined in this article are based on teaching experience gained in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including the courses “Representations of Helsinki” (together with Dr. Giacomo Bottà) and “City in Literature” (“Kaupunki kirjallisuudessa”) at the University of Helsinki, Finland, “City in Literature” (part together with Dr. Alan Prohm) at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia, and “City as Narrative” (“Kaupunki kertomuksena”), a cooperation between the Tampere University of Technology and University of Tampere, Finland. Reference will be made here primarily to the course Space, City, and Literature (“Tila, kaupunki ja kirjallisuus”), taught at the University of Tampere in spring 2016. The course requirements include reading Teju Cole’s novel Open

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City (2011), in addition to a selection of literary excerpts and scholarly texts. Students were asked permission for using and quoting from assignments. In social and urban studies, the panorama and the walk have long been recognized as fundamental cognitive strategies. A crucial point of departure is Charlotte Linde’s and William Labov’s distinction between the map and the tour, in the context of their sociolinguistic study of attitudes towards urban life, and Michel de Certeau’s distinction, in part drawing on Linde and Labov, between the city walk as urban practice and the city panorama as totalizing strategy.5 Recent studies in literary urban studies have pointed at the importance of this juxtaposition in structuring spatial experiences in literary representations of the city.6 I am particularly interested in how literary fiction interacts with such everyday frames of meaning, and how these narrative strategies render a sense of presence in addition to conveying meaning.7 The panorama tends to be intuitively associated with rational distancing and the attribution of meaning, and the figure of the city walker with a sense of (physical, embodied) presence. In literary fiction as in real life, however, the experience of presence and a sense of rational meaning are more often intertwined and in what follows, the juxtaposition of critical texts, literary fiction, and student assignments is intended to take into account these various aspects of the walk and the panorama.

The panorama The panorama, “a picture of a landscape [. . .] to be viewed from a central position” (OED), or, in common understanding of the word, a comprehensive bird’s-eye view of a landscape or scene, is one of the guiding perspectives of the city in literature. The Olympic perspective is often that of an inhuman or superhuman character, literally able to rise above the powers of the normal; the narrator in the bird’s-eye view chapter in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831); the devil as Asmodeus in André Lesage’s The Bottled Devil (1707), or in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Faustian novel The Master and Margarita (1967). In Roland Barthes’s essay “The Eiffel Tower,” it is the tower itself which looks at Paris, and going up the tower is to “perceive, comprehend, and savor a certain essence of Paris.”8 As Barthes points out, the panorama “gives us the world to read and not only to perceive,”9 and the panorama is thus similar to the act of both reading and narrating, exacting a transition from knowing to telling. Contextualizing the panorama in teaching a literary urban studies class will consist, first, of drawing students’ attention to its wider cognitive relevance, as well as to its cultural and historical context through relevant readings in social and urban studies. The texts by Linde and Labov, Barthes, and de Certeau can be considered as important points of departure in this respect. An acquaintance with some of the classical examples of the panorama in city novels will further attune students to how this representational strategy is drawn upon in specific genre and period-specific contexts, and in national literatures. Recent advances in cognitive theory have emphasized the fundamentally situated nature of cognition – the fact that it is always informed by the embodied

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interaction between cognizer and environment.10 Even when reading a novel that uses an invisible panoramic eye (rather than a personalized vantage point from a mountain top or tower window), the reader will tend to make use of earlier panoramic experiences that were grounded in a specific embodied interaction with an elevated perspective, since all seeing is informed and conditioned by our earlier, embodied visual experiences.11 In the course Space, City, and Literature (“Tila, kaupunki ja kirjallisuus”), students were given assignments aimed at attuning them to some of the practical and critical implications of the theoretical texts we read, but also to allow them to connect their own embodied experiences of the city as perceived from above with theoretical and literary approaches to the panorama. In one particular assignment, students were asked to visit a vantage point to the city and to write down in not more than 500 words a reflection on how this perspective informed their experience and view of the city. Possible text genres were the mini-essay, the list, and the short story. De Certeau’s text “Walking in the City” was given as supplementary reading. A new tower hotel (“Hotel Torni”) had only recently opened its doors at walking distance from the university campus, and most students carried out the assignment by going to the twenty-fifth floor café of the new hotel, which from 88 meters offers an almost unrestricted 360 degree view of the city of Tampere, a city of some 228,000 inhabitants in southern Finland. Other students went up to the “Näsinneula” observation tower by lake Näsijärvi, which, at 168 meters, is the highest observation tower in the Nordic countries. Several revealing observations can be drawn from the resulting student texts. Describing the city from this high vantage point seemed to invite the use of figurative language. One student described the “white building masses” as resembling “piles of ice that have drifted ashore,” another the streets as “too straight, as on a traffic mat.” The detached perspective seemed to invite comparisons from other mediatized description – one student wrote that, viewed from Näsinneula, “Baraddûr [the new tower hotel] was completely invisible in the middle of the snowfall,” thus interpreting Tampere’s “two towers” in terms of Tolkien’s book by the same name. The artificiality of the resulting view was noted by several students: to one, the city resembled “the kind of miniature model often seen in museums.” Several students noticed that the vantage point enabled them to see the city as an identifiable environment in terms of its limits and borders. But other elements were obscured by that same perspective: landmarks on the ground, such as the centrally located Hämeensilta bridge, disappeared against their background; “only really big things, such as the sports stadium and Näsinneula draw the attention”; and the trees and parks, while tangibly present on ground level, “drown in the rest of the mass of grey buildings.” Some students noted the voyeuristic aspect and the sense of freedom that came with the detached view, and with the possibility to observe people who were not aware they were being watched. Others observed the embodied feelings related to this view of the city from above: the limited auditory and olfactory sensations, or a sense of nausea and vertigo; or the awareness of how physical structures and the

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presence of other people blocked the view and affected their experience of viewing the city. The framed and mediated panorama that was constructed on the basis of a high vantage point was thus not merely a detached cognitive conceptualization of space, but also informed by an embodied experience that was connected to the materiality of the built environment, and that invited particular descriptive strategies. Students were subsequently asked to apply the theoretical readings and experiences from their assignments to an extract from Teju Cole’s Open City (2011): the description of New York City, seen from an airplane by the protagonist Julius, as he returns from Brussels halfway through the novel.12 It is a sufficiently short passage for pedagogical purposes – a little over one page – while dense in meaning, and with immediate relevance for the novel’s overall thematic concerns. Ideally, the preceding steps had attuned students to some of the more prominent meanings of the panorama in this specific passage, and their significance for a broader understanding of the novel. Such crucial aspects include the explicit artificiality of the panorama, which is described as resembling a scale model of the city Julius has seen in the Queens Museum of Art.13 Other relevant elements include the embodied and situated perspective of Julius as the plane readies for landing (such as the effect of the pilot’s voice), and the metaphorical and mediated narrative strategies invited by the panoramic perspective (the city below as “a vast graveyard,” the map of the city as reminiscent of that of Borges’s cartographers).14 The panorama in the novel is thus linked to the aestheticizing and totalizing project of memorizing the city, drawing attention to the futile artistry involved in such a project. Significantly, Julius is similarly engaged in a project of aesthetically mapping the city and his own life, a contradictory project that foregrounds, if anything, the aloofness and “stillness” of life when transformed into an aesthetic, comprehensible totality.15

The panorama and the kaleidoscope The panorama gives a bird’s-eye view of the city, but a built or natural vantage point can, in turn, provide a focal point that connects the disparate perspectives on ground level, and in this sense, it is merely a change in perspective to move from the panorama to the kaleidoscope. For Barthes, it was a comforting thought that the Eiffel tower would be there “all this night, too . . . connecting me above Paris to each of my friends that I know are seeing it,”16 suggesting an urban reality that is experienced simultaneously by interconnected characters who are not necessarily aware of each other’s existence, a trope that can also be found in a range of kaleidoscopic city novels: “Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortland. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.”17 In these opening sentences of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, a sense of simultaneous presence and the interlinking of various urban fates is intimated in the description of what happens in the heights: Philippe Petit’s 1974 tight-rope walk between the World Trade Towers. In the paragraphs that follow, the spatial description moves from the spectacle “[u]p there, at the height of a hundred and

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ten stories,” gradually closer and closer to street level, eventually focusing, seemingly contiguously, on disparate elements only somewhat above ground level: A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.18 The scene is notable for its exploitation of the cinematic zoom effect and for its use of enumerative lists, the first (“On Church Street . . .”) as a way to connect isolated spatial perspectives, the second (“A flying chocolate wrapper . . .”) arguably more about foregrounding the contiguousness of unrelated urban fragments. In thematic terms, the scene is programmatic in its foreshadowing of the experiences of 9/11 in a historical novel set in 1974. What is particularly striking, for our purpose, is the gradual change from an interconnecting high perspective to the disparate and mundane experiences on ground level: feet on the pavement; trash forgotten in the alleyways; overheard conversations. In the course of a few paragraphs, we have moved from panoramic heights into the realm of the city walker. Observed by a city walker who combines the keen eye of a rag-picker with acute poetic vision, the fragments of urban reality on street level are transformed into an aesthetically coherent, kaleidoscopic panorama of the city – an alchemical operation which was pioneered in the poetry and prose poems of Charles Baudelaire. The close link between the city walker and the production of an urban panorama, a link pointed out already by Walter Benjamin,19 is also established in the technological, artistic, and media innovations that were the antecedents and catalysts for the gradually growing importance of both conceptualizations in city literature. Dana Brand, in The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American Literature, notes that the early “New York flaneurs [of the 1840s] were always comparing their productions to panoramas, dioramas, and daguerreotypes.”20 Composing a panorama of urban diversity in literature or in the burgeoning newspaper columns of the nineteenth century meant presenting a weighted selection of “slices” or “sketches” of city life. The figure to select and to transform such urban “tableaux” into art, is, in the famous words of Baudelaire, the flâneur: the “painter of modern life,” who, in his work, distills the “eternal from the transitory.”21 The flâneur is a figure that has come to haunt city literature from its inception in the works by Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, and a host of often anonymous authors in the press. His keen interest in the processes of modernity, technological innovation, and commodification, as well as the foregrounding of semi-public spaces of consumption as his prowling grounds, and his innate nostalgia and preoccupation with urban memory and revelation, have assured the flâneur a continued place of interest in literary urban studies, which has not, however, remained uncontested during the past decades.

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Getting lost: teaching the city walker This is not the place to revisit at length the well-established literature of the city walker in urban and literary urban studies. Some critical reflections will have to be made, however, to contextualize the continued relevance of the flâneur for teaching literary urban studies. First, it should be noted that in Walter Benjamin’s influential work on Baudelaire, as in Georg Simmel’s thinking on the urban condition,22 the figure of the city walker is enmeshed in an “aesthetics of shock,” an approach that has helped frame the flâneur’s connections to the commodification and the modernization of the urban experience, as well as the aestheticizing sense of epiphany in city literature, from Baudelaire to Joyce and beyond. However, by privileging the disorienting entry point into modernity above other kinds of city walks, this shock aesthetics has tended to obscure our understanding of how more mundane and routine experiences of movement through the city are imbued with meaning, a point that is forcibly made, amongst others, by Franco Moretti.23 One way to approach routine walks is the conceptualization of walking as speech act, as outlined by de Certeau.24 Recent advances in cultural and humanistic geography and urban sociology have contributed considerably to our understanding of the importance of routes and modes of mobility for our perception and experience of everyday surroundings,25 and these can act as a useful alternative or corrective addition to the conceptualization of the flâneur in literary urban studies. Second, just as the panorama is no innocent visualizing presentation, even (or especially) when it aims at an “objective” and detached perspective, the personalized and ground-level perspective is not free from totalizing inflections. This is true, in particular, for the gendered undercurrents of the figure of the flâneur and the male gaze. Starting from the 1980s, a steady critique of the figure of the flâneur from feminist and gendered perspectives has appeared, initiated by Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock, amongst others.26 These critical reflections have not, however, rendered the flâneur obsolete in teaching literary urban studies; if anything, the recent critique has added new layers of meaning to its applicability to mediated experiences of the city. Teaching the flâneur will entail contextualizing this figure within social and urban studies as well as within the more recent studies from gendered and critical geography perspectives, and students will benefit from exposure to some of the key literary antecedents in literature, beginning with Baudelaire’s poems and prose poems, and Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840). But as in the case of the panorama, the flâneur is an attitude and a way of seeing, as well as an embodied, enacted way of being in the world, and a strategy of mediating such particular experiences. Taking students from their desks into the city with the task to go “botanizing on the asphalt”27 constitutes one step in familiarizing them with the practical implications of the city walk. In the course Space, City, and Literature, students received two alternatives to the assignment of the panorama described above, both of them geared towards rethinking the features dominating the discussion of the flâneur. One of these alternative assignments consisted of a visit to a shopping mall, with the task to observe this semi-public space of consumerism in view of Elizabeth Wilson’s reading of the

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flâneur in the article “The Invisible Flâneur” (1992). In the other, which will be discussed at more length here, the task was to take a walk that begins from an everyday premise (say, from home to work, or from home to university), changing the route along the way until the walker finds himself/herself in entirely unfamiliar surroundings. In some cases, turning a few corners differently than usually would suffice to complete the task, in other cases, detours were considerably longer. The objective of the assignment was a controlled experiment in getting lost.28 Students were asked to document how the drifting perspective structured their experiences and visualization of the city. De Certeau’s text “Walking in the City” and Elizabeth Wilson’s “The Invisible Flâneur” were used as supplementary reading. While many of the student observations were in tune with what could have been expected from informal descriptions of everyday walking experiences, several of their texts emphasized the specific embodied nature of this experience, and shed light on the narrative strategies walking would seem to invite when translated into written text. Not surprisingly, the student texts noted the importance of daily routes in structuring everyday cognitive mapping, and the large blind spots that exist outside of such routes. For the students who succeeded in getting lost, the unfamiliar environments (and the dictates of the assignments) gave rise to an intensified observation of the environment and attention to detail. This resulted in, amongst others, an enumeration of written signs in the built environment (notably publicity signs) and the chain of associations put in motion by such textual signs. The heightened attention to detail was contiguous with an endeavor to read spatial surroundings in terms of decipherable signs. Students repeatedly noted how (in particular, when they were lost) they tried to imagine the lives and social backgrounds of the strangers they saw, describing how they would peer through windows to gather signs of unknown lives on the basis of objects or activities: “That must be a slum house. After all, no. It has a bookshelf. Is a bookshelf a sign that there’s civilized people living there?” “Behind one window a shining blue glow, people watching television already at three o’clock in the afternoon. Probably pensioners.” The exercise in getting lost resulted in an intensifying of the quick assessments people tend to make of strangers seen in urban space, a strategy that can also be considered as an important undercurrent of city literature, as Hana Wirth-Nesher has suggested.29 Students noted that, at street level, examining strangers’ lives came with a sense of self-awareness and visibility, with the awkward realization that a gaze could be answered, something that was in striking contrast to the sense of freedom experienced by students up in the tower. As in the case of the panorama, the objective of the assignments was ultimately to provide the students with new insights into meanings attached to city walking in specific literary texts. Students were asked to apply insights from the theoretical readings and from their own experiences of the city when considering the city walker in Open City. Cole’s novel draws extensively on earlier literature of the flâneur, and in this limited space, it will be impossible to begin to exhaust its rich material. Some elements can be pointed out: the way, for example, in which the protagonist reads his environment in terms of readable signs, a process that includes continuous endeavors to imagine stories for the people he meets or sees.30 This process is far from innocent: it emphasizes the narrator’s power over other people’s

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narrated lives, and, seen in the light of the critique of the flâneur’s male gaze, it is noteworthy that this power is, in Open City, linked to gendered violence. Significantly, the city walks in Open City draw part of their meaning also from how they are juxtaposed with occasional descriptions from higher grounds, such as the view of New York as seen from the airplane window mentioned earlier, and again towards the end of the novel, in scenes where the narrator has privileged views over the Hudson river, and from a fire escape of Carnegie Hall.31 In this succession of ground level and bird’s-eye view perspectives, seeing and experiencing the city is continuously translated into complementary forms of knowledge.

Conclusion In city literature, the panorama and the walk are crucial strategies to move from vision to knowledge, from seeing to telling, embodied ways of seeing and ways of being in the city which result in specific narrative patterns. In the case of the panorama, one such pattern is the appearance of figurative language to emphasize borders, and the metaphorization of spatial totalities; in the case of the city walker, notable narrative strategies include the enumeration of seemingly disparate and mundane elements, reflecting the consecutive appearance of fragmentary impressions on ground level. The oscillation between high vantage point and street level perspectives also foregrounds the city novel’s concern with negotiating distances – spatial, social, moral, linguistic and other.32 In teaching the city walker and the panorama, it will inevitably be important to provide contextualization within the broader relevant literature in urban studies, cultural geography, and sociology, as well as in terms of canonical and other examples from literary fiction. I argue that it is also crucial to balance such theoretical perspectives and fictional text readings with student tasks that take theorizations and mediations of the urban experience out of the classroom and into the city. The assignments described here, centering on enactments of the panorama and controlled attempts at “getting lost” point in that direction. Apart from attuning students to the practical implications of conceptualizations such as the panorama and the flâneur, they also emphasize the situated and embodied character of such cognitive approaches to the city. They can also act as starting points for a critical assessment of the continuing relevance of specific theoretical approaches that always stem from particular historical and geographical contexts. Finally, they may act as a reflection on the practice of reading and literary criticism itself, since moving forward into the literary city text resembles the alternation between an almost myopic, linear progression and the occasional distancing, totalizing perspectives that typifies real-life encounters with the city.

Notes 1 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Bantam Books, 1971/1988), 16. 2 Ibid., 19. 3 See Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” New Left Review I/191 (1992): 90–110.

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4 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 5 Ibid., 118–120, 91–110; Charlotte Linde and William Labov, “Spatial Networks as a Site for the Study of Language and Thought,” Language 51 (1975): 924–939. 6 See Lieven Ameel, Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Finnish Literature (Helsinki: SKS, 2014); Kevin R. McNamara, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–17. 7 See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 8 Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964/1996), 241. 9 Ibid., 242. 10 See Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). 11 See R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966). 12 Teju Cole, Open City (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 149–151. 13 Ibid., 150. 14 Ibid. 15 See Lieven Ameel, “Open City: Reading Signs of Uncertain Times in New York and Brussels,” in Mielikuvituksen maailmat/Fantasins världar/Worlds of Imagination, eds. Merja Polvinen, Maria Salenius, and Howard Sklar (Turku: Eetos, 2017), 290–308. 16 Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” 236. 17 Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House, 2009), 3. 18 Ibid., 4. 19 Benjamin, The Writer, 66. 20 Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 74–75. 21 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1863/1964), 12. 22 See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1903/1969), 47–60. 23 Franco Moretti, “Homo Palpitans. Balzac’s Novels and Urban Personality,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms, ed. Franco Moretti (London: Verso, 1983/2005), 109–129. 24 de Certeau, The Practice; see also Ameel, Helsinki in Early. 25 See Peter Merriman and Tim Cresswell, eds., Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 26 See Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988); Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory, Culture & Society 2, no. 3 (1985): 37–46. 27 Benjamin, The Writer, 68. 28 See Eric Bulson, Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 (London: Routledge, 2006), 107–131. 29 Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes. Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10. 30 Ameel, “Open City.” 31 Cole, Open City, 239–246, 255–257. 32 See Lieven Ameel, “The City Novel: Measuring Referential, Spatial, Linguistic, and Temporal Distances,” in The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 233–241.

10 MODELING INTERDISCIPLINARITY Spaces of modern Paris through literature and design Andrea Goulet and Eugenie L. Birch

Building upon interdisciplinary research trends in the spatial humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has recently funded a five-year initiative at the University of Pennsylvania called H+U+D (Humanities, Urbanism, and Design) that aims to foster critical and integrative dialogue between scholars in the humanities and in the design professions. Among H+U+D’s goals was the creation of collaborative, field-crossing “city seminars” devoted to the in-depth study of a single city. Resulting courses included “Baltimore and the Wire,” on crime, poverty, and urban deindustrialization; “Rio de Janeiro: Cosmopolitan Urbanism in the 21st Century”; and “Venice: Self-Representation, Performance, and Reception” (www.humanitiesurbanismdesign. com/coursework/). In this chapter, the authors will discuss pedagogical strategies for an undergraduate city seminar on the built environment of Paris that we co-taught in 2015 and 2016: The Making of Modern Paris. Through a two-pronged study of literature (by authors like Hugo, Baudelaire, Zola, Breton, and Modiano) and design (urban planning projects from Viollet-le-Duc and Haussmann to Mitterrand and Sarkozy) from the post-Revolutionary period to today, the course aimed to expand students’ knowledge of how to “read” the spaces of a city as they develop over time. Although the primary focus was on Paris as it moved from a pre-industrial capital to a post-industrial global hub, we also encouraged students to attend critically to the larger ideological and rhetorical strategies at work in representations of modernity and urban space. To that end, we included a bibliography (excerpted below) that incorporates the varied methodological approaches of literary analysis, cultural and urban studies, historic preservation, design, planning, and architectural history.

Interdisciplinarity in action We come from two different fields and training backgrounds (Birch, city and regional planning; Goulet, French literary studies), so, in developing the course, we wanted to foreground interdisciplinarity by pairing discussions of novels and poems with

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visual histories of the changing capital city. Certainly, similar courses and research approaches already exist; and we took advantage of invaluable resources like The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris (ed. Anna-Louise Milne, 2013). But we also wanted to ask what might differentiate our “H+U+D” seminar from a typical Paris-focused course situated within either a Romance Languages department or an Urban Studies program. One answer lies in the make-up of the student body: crosslisting allowed us to enroll majors in Architecture, Art History, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Fine Arts, French, International Relations, Urban Studies, and Visual Studies. While such a range posed the potential challenge of uneven background knowledge, we found pedagogical success in harnessing the students’ varied skill sets and methodological approaches. For example, in one assignment (discussed in further detail below), we paired students who identify primarily as humanists with those who are training to be practitioners in planning/design for a site-specific research project that combined urban history, impact documentation, and analysis of cultural and artistic representations. Generous grants (from H+U+D and the PennGlobal initiative) allowed us to incorporate a week-long class trip to Paris, with an emphasis on modern architectural history; visits included exhibits at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine and the Musée Carnavalet as well as tours of underground Paris and above-ground initiatives like the Cent Quatre cultural center, built on a former municipal funerary site in the 19th arrondissement. But even without this travel element, the seminar provided ample material for an enriching semester that bridges textual interpretation with scholarly practices in the field of urban studies. We highlighted interdisciplinarity from the start, with a first-day session on the emblematic Eiffel Tower that featured posters from the 1889 World’s Fair (available on the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica site); students were asked to reflect on the tower’s history and discuss the images’ visual rhetorics, their emphasis on feminine nature through floral motifs or on masculine modernity through bold metallic lines and the technological language of engineering. Such discourse analysis was encouraged by the 1964 Roland Barthes essay, “The Eiffel Tower,” assigned as a pre-class reading. One line of that text in particular elicited explicit discussion of the ways in which humanists and urban planners read the built environment differently: “Architecture,” writes Barthes, “is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.” From the perspective of design, Barthes’s approach might give short shrift to Gustave Eiffel’s technological innovations, his use of modern design materials, and the practical potentiality of the Tour itself as radio tower or scientific lab. A humanist might respond that by adding dream to function, Barthes encourages us to reflect on the monument’s affective and symbolic meanings as well as on the political ideologies that underlie seemingly neutral language about its technical function. To capture the landmark’s urbanistic impact we enriched this discussion of the tower’s symbolic resonance by having students view images of the tower in triumph (construction and inauguration), commercial splendor (a bold, glittering Citroen ad running the tower’s full height), defeat (Hitler’s pose after conquest in front of the tower), celebration (a giant French flag topping the tower in 1944), sorrow (the brutal New Yorker cover after the Charlie

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Hebdo slaughter), defiance (its brilliant tri-color illumination after the November 2015 terrorist attacks), and celebration (the several foot-high announcement of the climate change agreement in December 2015). Combining our two perspectives allowed for a historically-informed critical engagement with both the materiality of the city and its political and representational contexts. Such discussion also allowed us explicitly to explore with our students the overlaps, rifts, and productive tensions between the fields of Design and the Humanities.

Course units (1) Introduction and overview: maps and graphic images As one of the key objectives of the course was to teach the students how to “read” the city, we determined to blend three major perspectives (historical, literary, and spatial) and to explore the interaction among them in each class. Reviewing maps, site plans and images became an important centerpiece of the class – we spent as much time on this effort as in the examination of the literature. In so doing, we aimed not only to deepen the students’ experience of both disciplines but also to integrate the two fields with our presentations and their discussions, informed by each other’s customary disciplinary assessments. We wanted to move the students from merely viewing the graphic material as interesting “pictures” to having a strong understanding about the drivers of the spatial and architectural evolution of Paris while fortifying their imaginations of how Parisians might have moved about the city. To orient the students, we presented a straightforward analysis of Paris’s growth recorded in maps and images over time. We started with a 3rd-century rendition of the Roman settlement on the Île de la Cité – which took on more meaning in a later class when we showed them 19th century photographs of the discovery of the ruins and studied various authors’ reflections on the Roman heritage. (Colin Jones, “Theodore Vacquer and the Archaeology of Modernity in Haussmann’s Paris,” Transactions of the RHS 17, 2007, 157–83). We moved to the 12th century with maps recording the development of the Right Bank and its first walled enclosures, followed by medieval manuscript illuminations of Parisian street life and then the 16th-century Braun map that recorded not only winding streets in two dimensions but also the built environment in three dimensions – especially bridges built up with housing – and the city’s fortified edges. Gaultier’s 17th-century bird’s-eye view revealed not only the city but the surrounding topography, including Montmartre portrayed in all its height. We tracked the 19th-century expansion of Paris, as rendered in city atlases – with their detailed maps of the growing arrondissements – and Romantic paintings. Finally, we moved into the 20th century by showing plans and images of Mitterand’s Grands Projets and Sarkozy’s plans for Greater Paris. In providing tangible evidence of the city – its streets, its buildings, its open spaces, the bridges and river – we helped the students interpret what they were viewing. First, we showed how they might employ urban designer Kevin Lynch’s analysis of legibility elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks) that

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identify a city and we asked them to think about how the authors they were reading recorded those elements in Paris. [Lynch, Kevin. Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960)]. Second, for each reading, we detailed the city of the times. Here, we provided historical accounts of key developments, interpreted the drivers of change, and demonstrated their physical manifestations while speculating on how these conditions might have influenced each author’s works. For example, after studying Hugo and entering into a discussion of Zola, we presented a map that contrasted the physical boundaries and contents of Paris portrayed in Notre-Dame de Paris with those in The Ladies’ Paradise and The Belly of Paris. We supplemented the maps with simple but stark descriptive data: Hugo’s Paris covered 440 hectares and housed 150,000 people while Zola’s city portrayed a city of 7,800 hectares and 1.7 million people. Here graphic images – paintings, photography, etchings, and postcards – were critically important in emphasizing the many city-builders’ contributions to the dramatic 19th-century transformation of Paris. What better way to convey the visual impact of industrializing, modernizing Paris than through Claude Monet’s smoky Gare St Lazare, Victor Gilbert’s sloppy fishmongers in Les Halles, or Paul Sedille’s longitudinal section of the massive Printemps department store? Third, we guided student engagement with original archival documents, including 19th-century travelogues, diaries and pamphlets. Digitizing initiatives such as Gallica and Brown University’s “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century” have facilitated access to such documents. And many rare book and manuscript libraries, such as the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania, are open to course visits from other institutions. For our seminar, a highlight came when students donned white cotton gloves to page through the plates of the Kislak Center’s original 18thcentury manuscript of the Turgot map of Paris (1734–1736). The map’s bird’s-eye view left the students in awe, asking: “How did the cartographer detail the city from above when he had no possibility of ascending?” We had told them that the Montgolfiers would not invent the hot air ballon for another decade, so the work was even more remarkable for its detailed research and artistry; here we experienced an 18th-century blending of the art and science of rendering urbanization. (Of note, a navigable version of the Turgot map is available online at http://edb.kulib. kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit-e/f28/f28cont.html).

(2) Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris We plunged into medieval Paris through Hugo’s portrayal of the city from his early 19th-century vantage point. Like Hugo, we used the Turgot map and other plans and images from the times, fortifying them with passages from Henri Sauval’s Histoire et recherches des antiquites de la ville de Paris (1724), to identify the 15th-century sites Hugo describes so vividly throughout his 1831 novel. Matching literary descriptions to cartographic depictions, we found the former Palace of Justice with its Great Hall and the still-remaining Saint Chapelle, several fountains (e.g. St. Innocent), bridges (Pont-au – Change, Pont-Neuf), the Châtelet, the Place de Grève, the Hôtel de Ville, the Louvre palace, and of course the Notre Dame cathedral with

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its surrounds on the Île de la Cité. We speculated about the disputed location of the Court of Miracles, that semi-legendary urban gathering-place for beggars and ruffians. As we pored over the maps in parallel with reading descriptions of the cathedral in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009; Book 3, chapter 1), we shared his outrage at its poor condition. He showed us how its façade was a mere shadow of its former glory; its rows of saints’ statues beheaded and smashed, its central portal pierced, and its central spire amputated. Inside, the church was in an even worse state, with its rich treasure of stone, marble, gold, silver, brass, and wax monuments “brutally swept out” and its graceful Gothic altar replaced by a heavy piece of marble that looked like it should have been in a military hospital like the Invalides or Val-de-Grâce. Perhaps, decries Hugo, the worst offense was the substitution of “cold white glass” for the richly stained vitrines of the past. Hugo’s diatribe in an 1832 note to the novel’s definitive edition (Notre-Dame de Paris, 10) against contemporary architects as mutilators, vandals, and “plaster-sloppers” gave us the opportunity to discuss the intersection of literature, design and public action. We demonstrated to the students how Hugo’s powerful narrative helped energize contemporary activists to launch a lengthy campaign for the Notre Dame cathedral’s restoration, culminating in the French government’s sponsorship of what would become a massive, 25-year project under Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In briefing the students on the restoration, we ventured into a brief assessment of Viollet-le-Duc’s contributions to historic preservation and a nationwide Gothic Revival, a subject that resonated with the budding architects in the class.

(3) Haussmannization and its discontents Although many elements of the Second Empire urban renewal overseen by Georges-Eugène Haussmann had already been put into place by earlier Paris Prefects Chabrol and Rambuteau, the dramatically large scale of boulevard percements and neighborhood restructuring under Napoléon III’s regime is indisputable and can be made visible to students through “before and after” images of the city, such as those by the photographer Charles Marville. That general transformation provides the background to a “case study” of the rise of the modern department store that pairs an architectural look at Aristide Boucicaut’s real-life expansion in 1852 of the Bon Marché drapery shop into the large grand magasin that still exists on Paris’s left bank with a literary analysis of Emile Zola’s 1883 novel The Ladies’ Paradise. Brian Nelson’s Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics 1995 edition of Zola’s novel is particularly useful to assign, since it provides a succinct and historically-grounded reflection on capitalism’s accelerated circulation of commodities as directly affecting the Second Empire re-organization of urban space; through this perspective, city planning becomes the materialization of a bourgeois “dream-state” of false harmony and self-alienation. The negative underside of modern progress is amply figured in The Ladies’ Paradise by small shopkeepers like Bourras and Robineau, victims of the department store owner Mouret’s aggressive financial speculations

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and predatory expansion. On the other hand, Mouret’s own appealing dynamism and his store’s glittering sources of pleasure and opportunity present the undeniably seductive appeal of the new spatio-economic modes of consumer culture. And what of Denise Baudu, who is drawn with fearful fascination to the energy nexus that is Au Bonheur des dames? Persistent ambiguities in Zola’s novel provide rich material for an in-class debate on the question of whether the text argues, in the end, for or against this form of modernization. We asked our students to prepare for such a debate by finding scenes and passages that support their chosen side, then to come together for active discussion. Their observations on Zola’s representation of the eclipse of small shops by the grands magasins in the Second Empire France also led to discussion of relevant tensions today between, for example, local bookstores and blockbuster Amazon.

(4) Reading/walking/“writing” the city Walter Benjamin’s association of flânerie with modern Paris provided context for in-class literary analyses of Baudelaire’s “The Swan,” with its famous nostalgic lament for lost Paris, and his Spleen de Paris (pub. 1869), from which we assigned fourteen prose poems most relevant to the changing city-scape of the Second Empire. These included “The Crowds,” in which anonymous encounters afford the urban flâneur a paradoxical solitude within multitude; “The Old Acrobat,” featuring a marginalized figure at the edges of the Second Empire tumult; and “Eyes of the Poor,” set in a glittering boulevard café but confronting the alienation and misunderstandings of cross-class encounters. We then contrasted 19th-century flânerie to the later, experimental explorations of spatial/textual wandering in Aragon’s 1926 The Paris Peasant [Exact Change, 1994], with its new mythologies of modern urban life in which gasoline pumps or shop signs on a bustling street can become aura-laden divinities, and Breton’s 1928 Nadja [Grove Press, 1960], in which aleatory perambulations produce fortuitous juxtapositions and chance encounters that tap into mystical unconscious drives. In one assignment, we asked students to read Breton’s “Soluble Fish” and to follow the instructions in his “Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art” (from the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism) to produce their own pieces of automatic writing. We also discussed the ways in which nodes and landmarks in the real topography of a city become magnetic poles of “psychogeography” in the avant-garde vision of the Situationist International (1957–72) and asked them to apply Situationist practices of dérive (drift) and errance (wandering) in their own city in order to reflect on ways in which walking can become a way to “read” or “write” urban space. The anti-functionalism of surrealist and situationist literary/artistic/philosophical movements is connected to a revolutionary approach to urban planning and architecture, as we can see in Ivan Chtcheglove’s 1953 essay “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau”; he writes, “Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams.”

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(5) Food distribution Perhaps our most innovative thematic unit explored the history of Paris as an important hub for urban, regional, and international food distribution from the Middle Ages to today. The traditional central fresh food market Les Halles, enlarged by King Philippe II Auguste in 1183 and adjoined in the 16th century by the church of Saint-Eustache, underwent a modernizing transformation in the 1850s under Victor Baltard, who replaced ramshackle wooden stalls with symmetrical glass and iron buildings. These would last until the 1971 installment of the Forum des Halles shopping mall, which today has been completely reconstructed. Meanwhile, in 1969, the food market for Paris had been displaced into the southern suburbs to Rungis and is now (at 573 acres) the largest wholesale food market in the world. We assigned Emile Zola’s 1873 The Belly of Paris, a novel that captures the dynamism of the Baltard market while also manipulating history; diagrams of the new Halles and essays by Woollen and Mitterand allowed students to see how Zola conflated different time periods in the building’s construction in order to stage a (potentially subversive) fictional confrontation between the efficient march of Imperial progress and the socialist idealism of protagonist Florent Quenu. We continued to track the food distribution topic into the 20th and 21st centuries through recent scholarly essays (Keyser; Billen, et al.) and in-depth discussion of Mitterand’s Grand Projet transformation of traditional slaughterhouses at the Grande halle de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement into a modern park and cultural center. And finally, we showed and discussed Agnès Varda’s documentary film The Gleaners and I (2000), which depicts rural and urban practices of gathering discarded or abandoned materials and thus addresses important contemporary concerns about food circulation, waste, and reuse.

(6) The resilient city Another theme that emerged through our study of 19th and 20th-century Paris was that of the French capital’s exemplary resilience, a key term in urban studies today. Here, we noted a long list of civil disorders (revolutions, the Commune), humanitarian and natural disasters, and international disruptions (World Wars I and II) that should have overwhelmed the Parisians, crammed into 41 square miles; Paris’s land area was (and still is) a fraction of the size of its sister cities London (671 square miles) and New York City (304 square miles).1 Yet the city proved resilient to the steady stream of setbacks. Its demographic and economic growth soared as the population rose 70% between 1860 and 1936 while its GDP, which supplies about a third of the French total, prospered through industrial and retail expansion (with notable short-term blips in the 1870s due to the Franco-Prussian War reparations and in the early 1930s due to the worldwide Depression). The city was the beneficiary of important public investment in the Metro while the private sector expanded choices in entertainment and hospitality. Nonetheless, social and economic divisions persisted throughout the period along with international political challenges.

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To capture the essence of these phenomena, we chose authors like Patrick Modiano whose work is responsive to changing urban conditions but not as directly descriptive of their effects on the physical city as were 19th-century authors like Hugo and Zola. In Modiano’s 1988 Dora Bruder, for example, the author’s inconclusive search for the traces and itinerary of an adolescent girl who disappeared from Paris during the Nazi Occupation reflects the spatial, narrative, and moral confusion of disruptive historical events. The shocking terrorist attacks in January and November 2015 deepened the students’ discussions of works such as Dora Bruder, making its depictions of the fragility of urban life quite tangible.

(7) Paris today and tomorrow In the final weeks of the class we turned to contemporary urban issues: how Paris is dealing with overall population growth, the change in its economy brought on by globalization, the need to adapt large parts of the city to accommodate new businesses and housing, and the persistence of poverty and racial disparities among immigrants. In dealing with the overall issues of growth and adaptation, we reviewed maps and plans of the 1970s New Towns efforts, Mitterand’s Grand Projets, and Sarkozy’s Global Plan for the Paris Metropolitan Region. For the deeper socio-political issues, we employed two often-taught films, La Haine (1995) and Bande de filles (2014), that illustrate life in postwar suburban social housing. We emphasized the ways in which adolescent alienation is linked to spatial milieu through the cinematographic depictions of the massive, modernist HLM (Habitation à Loyer Modéré) settlements, disconnected physically, economically, and socially from the city of Paris. These marginalized concrete “Cités” allowed us to reflect synthetically on the centuries-long physical expansion of Paris in concentric circles from the central Ile de la Cité of ancient Lutetia to the extraperiphery developments today. We also contextualized some aspects of the two films with a discussion of current city-sponsored experiments of mixed income housing being developed in Paris [see on-line resources in bibliography below].

(8) Student projects In addition to a midterm examination asking students to analyze literary passages and to compare Paris maps from different eras, we assigned two projects for the course. For the first, a City Site Report, we asked students to select pairs with, ideally, one member majoring in the humanities and the other in urban studies or architecture. Each team of two selected a site (e.g. a building or cluster of buildings, a district, park or plaza) on which to report. Their report had research and observational components bounded by three requirements. The first requirement called for a brief history (covering the following questions: created when? By whom? For what purpose? Has it changed/been reconfigured over time? Why? What is/are its function(s) today?). The second requirement asked for a physical assessment with a location map and site plan accompanied by material inventory (location, structure and style, form and function, physical description, use during different times of

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day). The third requirement bid the team to link the site to myths and meanings (artistic representations, symbolic meanings and cultural associations, and political/ ideological, or personal connections). The students presented their work through in-class powerpoints followed by written reports. Their chosen topics included the arcades, the Palais Royal, the Buttes Chaumont park, the Hotel/Musée Cluny, and the Pigalle quartier. For a final project at the end of the semester, we allowed each student considerable latitude in selecting his or her individual investigation. Here, we received traditional papers on such subjects as “The Colonial Exposition and La Haine: Exoticization of the Other,” “Female Representation and Participation in the Surrealist Movement in Paris,” “Twenty Thousand Germans in Paris: Effects of the Third Reich’s Military Administration on the Urban Image of Paris during World War Two,” and “The Metro.” But we also encouraged creative formats beyond a written essay; one student contributed “Revisualizing Gothic Paris: Examples of Stylization and the Gothic Movement in Ile de France,” a portfolio of handdrawn renderings of Gothic cathedrals, while another submitted a richly illustrated e-magazine titled “Paris: The Adaptive City, Adaptive Reuse in a 21st-Century City.”

Conclusion The city of Paris is a particularly rich object for interdisciplinary study. The literary resources and city planning and architecture examples and scholarship on the two are ample and complementary. In the case of our co-taught course, the integration of two streams of disciplinary inquiry enriched the students’ appreciation for the craft of writing and their understanding of the spatial, social, political, and economic complexity of urbanism in that specific “capital of modernity.” But the seminar’s merging of cross-field approaches to the built environment can certainly also be applied to other cities, other sites, and other eras.

Note 1 A select list is: 1830 (overthrow of the July Monarchy), 1832 (cholera epidemic), 1848 (Revolutions of ’48), 1849 (cholera epidemic), 1870 (German barricade and Commune), 1910 (Great Flood), 1914–18 (near occupation by the Germans, food shortages, devastating wartime losses of young men, 1.4 million dead and more than 4 million wounded in France), 1918 (flu epidemic), and within the next two decades the German occupation of Paris and the holocaust (1940–45). (Source: http://demographia.com/dm-par90.htm).

Select bibliography Atlas administratif de Paris (Paris: Lottin de St-Germain, 1828). Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Arcades Project (Boston, MA: Belknap, 2002). Bercé, Françoise. Viollet le Duc (Editions du Patrimoine Centre des monuments nationaux, 2013). Billen, G., S. Barles, P. Chatzimpiros, and J. Garnier. “Grain, Meat and Vegetables to Feed Paris: Where Did and Do They Come From? Localising Paris Food Supply Areas From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century,” Regional Environmental Change, 12 (2012): 325–333.

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Bouvet, Vincent and Gerard Durozoi. Paris Between the Wars 1919–1939: Art, Life and Culture (New York, NY: Vendome Press, 2010). Brigstocke, Julian. The Life of the City: Space, Humour, and the Experience of Truth in Fin-de-siècle Montmartre (Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014). Cannon, James. The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840–1944 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Cars, Jean and Pierre Pinon. Paris-Haussmann (Paris: Picard, 1991). Collard, Susan. “The Architecture of Power, François Mitterand and the Grands Travaux,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 14(2): 195–208. Conley, Verena Andermatt. Spatial Ecologies, Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). Couperie, Pierre. Paris Through the Ages: An Illustrated Historical Atlas of Urbanism and Architecture (New York: G. Braziller, 1971). DeJean, Joan. How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2014). De Senneville, Gérard. 1900: Journal d’un changement de siècle (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 2000). Evenson, Norma. Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Paris as Revolution: Writing the 19th-Century City (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Fierro, Alfred. Histoire et Dictionnaire de Paris (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1996). Hamon, Philippe. Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-century France (Berkeley, CA: 1992). Harvey, David. Paris: Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2003). Hazan, Eric. L’invention de Paris: Il N’y a Pas de Pas Perdus (Paris: Seuil, 2002) [tr. The Invention of Paris: A History Told in Footsteps (New York: Verso, 2010)]. Higonnet, Patrice. Paris, Capital of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Horvath, Christina, ed. “Exploring the Banlieue,” Francosphères 3(2) (2014). Jones, Colin. Paris: The Biography of a City (Penguin, 2006). Jovicic, Jelena, ed. La Modernité et la métropole: Pour une lecture de l’espace urbain au XIXe siècle (London and Ontario: Mestengo Press, 2007). Kennel, Sarah. Charles Marville, Photographer of Paris (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2013). Keyser, Catherine. “An All-Too-Moveable Feast: Ernest Hemingway and the Stakes of Terroir,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2(1) (Winter 2014). Kirkland, Stéphane. Paris Reborn, Napoleon III: Baron Haussmann and the Quest to Build a Modern City (New York: St. Martins Press, 2013). Knox, Paul, ed. Atlas of Cities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). La Bédollière, Emile de. Nouveau Paris; histoire de ses 20 arrondissements. Illustrations de Gustave Doré. Cartes topographiques de Desbuissons (Paris: Gustave Barba, 1860). Loyer, François. Paris XIXe siècle: l’immeuble et la rue (Paris: Hazan, 1987). Lynch, Kevin. Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). Marrinan, Michael. Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). McAuliffe, Mary. Dawn of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). McCullough, David. The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2012).

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Merriman, John M. The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815–1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Milne, Anna-Louis, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris (2013). Mitterand, Henri. “‘Tiens, voilà du boudin! . . . ’ Le Ventre de Paris ou la réécriture subversive du modèle haussmannien,” in Le miroir et le chemin: l’univers romanesque de Pierre-Louis Rey, ed. Vincent Laisney (Sorbonne nouvelle, 2006), 315–328. Pinçon, Michel and Monique Pinçon-Charlot. 15 promenades sociologiques dans Paris (Payot, 2009). Pinkney, David. Napoleon and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958). Pinon, Pierre and Bertrand Le Boudec. Les Plans de Paris: Histoire d’une capitale (Broché, 2014). Potofsky, Allan. Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Prendergast, Christopher. Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995). Reader, Keith. The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Schwartz, Vanessa and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds. The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004). Siegel, Jerrold. Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life 1830–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Sramek, Peter. Piercing Time: Paris After Marville and Atget 1865–2012 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Sutcliffe, Anthony. The Autumn of Central Paris: The Defeat of Town Planning 1850–1970 (Montreal: McGill, Queens Press, 1971). ———. Paris: An Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Verdugo, Gregory. “Public Housing and Residential Segregation of Immigrants in France,” Population, 66(1) (2011): 169–193. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Williams, Rosalind. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). Woollen, Geoff. “Zola’s Halles, a Grande Surface Before Their Time,” Romance Studies, 18(1) (June 2000). Yaari, Monique. Rethinking the French City: Architecture, Dwelling, and Display After 1968 (New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008).

Online resources “Bercy-Charenton, un projet métropolitain,” Mairie 12e Paris www.mairie12.paris.fr/mairie12/ jsp/site/Portal.jsp?page_id=186 “Charolais-Rotonde, quartier en devenir,” Mairie 12e Paris www.mairie12.paris.fr/mairie12/ jsp/site/Portal.jsp?page_id=184 “Exposition Paris Habitat: Cent ans de ville, cent ans de vie,” Pavillon de l’Arsenal (February 2015) www.pavillon-arsenal.com/expositions/habitat-metropole.php?p=paris-habitat#. Vd0PSkV3ZpZ “Floating Gardens, Giant Chalkboards, and Climbing Walls on Banks of Seine in Paris,” Sarah Amandolare, Urban Gardens (12 August 2013) www.urbangardensweb.com/2013/08/ 12/floating-gardens-giant-chalkboards-and-climbing-walls-on-banks-of-seine-inparis/

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“France Says New Roofs Must Be Covered in Plants or Solar Panels,” Ari Phillips, ClimateProgress (20 March 2015) http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/20/3636746/ franch-rooftops-go-green/ “La Haine 20 Years on: What Has Changed?” Andrew Hussey, The Guardian (May 2015) www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/03/la-haine-film-sequel-20-years-on-france “La SNCF et la mairie de Paris vont créer 14,200 logements dans la capitale,” Robert Viennet, MobiliCités (May 2015) www.mobilicites.com/011-3738-La-SNCF-et-la-mairie-de-Parisvont-creer-14-200-logements-dans-la-capitale.html “Le plan d’Anne Hidalgo pour les quartiers pauvres de Paris,” Béatrice Jérôme, Le Monde (16 March 2015) www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2015/03/16/le-plan-d-anne-hidalgopour-les-quartiers-pauvres-de-paris_4594169_823448.html “L’esthétique de la ruine. Paris, 1971, photographies les lendemains de la Commune,” Pecadille (15 September 2014) http://peccadille.net/2014/09/15/photographies-communeparis-1871/ “Mapping Maupassant’s Bel-Ami: Le Paris de Bel-Ami,” DH Project at Penn State University, dir. Willa Z. Silverman with Dawn Childress, Carl Cornell https://humanitieslab.psu. edu/projects/mappingbelami/ “Paris Build up of Urban Land, 1800–2000,” NYU Stern Urbanization Project www.youtube. com/watch?v=9ieL0A_icK0 “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century,” Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship http://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/ “Paris Councillors Back Plan for First New Skyscraper in 40 Years,” The Guardian (30 June 2015) www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/30/paris-councillors-back-plan-for-firstnew-skyscraper-in-40-years “Paris Wants to Keep Central Neighborhoods From Becoming ‘Ghettos for the Rich’,” Feargus O’Sullivan, The Atlantic (Citylab) (19 December 2014) www.citylab.com/housing/2014/12/paris-wants-to-keep-central-neighborhoods-from-becoming-ghettos-forthe-rich/383936/ “Place for Protest: Paris’s Historic Center for Dissent, Place de la République, Gets an Expansion and an Update,” Veronique Vienne, Metropolis Magazine (September 2014) www. metropolismag.com/Place-for-Protest/ “Plan de Turgot: Paris en 1734,” [navigable] http://plan.turgot.free.fr/plan_turgot/plan_ turgot.php “The Problem With an Invisible Tower in Paris,” Kriston Capps, The Atlantic (Citylab) (6 July 2015) www.citylab.com/housing/2015/07/the-problem-with-an-invisible-tower-inparis/397760/ “Reinventer Paris: Competition for Innovative Urban Projects,” www.reinventer.paris/en/ “Reinventing Paris: Building the City From the Bottom Up,” Jean-Louis Missika (Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of town planning, architecture, the Greater Paris projects, economic development and attractiveness), New Cities Foundation (27 January 2015) www.newcitiesfoundation.org/reinventing-paris-building-city-bottom/ “Timelapse de l’arrivée des manifestants à République,” Le Monde.fr (11 November 2015) www.lemonde.fr/societe/video/2015/01/11/timelapse-de-l-arrivee-des-manifestantsa-republique_4553880_3224.html “Urbanisme: Hidalgo donne les clés de 23 chantiers parisiens,” Sibylle Vincendon, Libération (3 November 2014) www.liberation.fr/politiques/2014/11/03/urbanisme-hidalgodonne-les-cles-de-23-chantiers_1135149

11 FROM ASHES TO PHOENIX A geocritical approach to teaching the literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London Catharina Löffler

The long eighteenth century,1 historically sandwiched between the English Renaissance and Victorian era, is a period often neglected in university education and study programs. Although there has been an increased interest in the study and teaching of eighteenth century literature and culture, as more and more centers for eighteenth-century studies at (particularly British) universities indicate, the majority of the latter are mostly made available to graduate and postgraduate students only. As a consequence, literature of the eighteenth century rolls by undergraduates and, for a lack of encounters and engagements with the period during their studies, young scholars and PhD-students turn to other, more familiar periods for their research projects. The long eighteenth century, however, is in fact a fascinating period of many literary developments: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the age of sensibility, the age of the rise of the novel, the beginnings of commercial writings, and many more. It is also the age of urbanization and of topographical development and in no other period was the transformation of a country’s capital into a metropolis more visible than then. London’s rise from ashes to phoenix, from its destruction after the Great Fire in 1666 to the biggest and most progressive city in eighteenth-century Europe therefore serve as excellent frameworks for promoting a motivating approach to a literary, culturally and historically unique period in British history and to engage undergraduate students for eighteenth-century studies as well as spatial studies. In this essay, I will provide didactic, methodological and theoretical approaches to teaching the literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London in the university classroom. By following not only a strictly literary approach but by also considering aspects pertaining to culture, history and society, students shall reach an understanding of urban life in the eighteenth-century English capital and its representations in literary texts from across genres. Therefore, it is the overall aim of the course to acquaint students with various aspects of London life at the time and to approach

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these aspects from various angles. The essay will present different methods and resources for teaching these issues over the course of one term (14 sessions á 90 minutes). The landscapes of London will be made accessible by reading literary texts by canonical and non-canonical authors from the period that provide insights into individual experiences of London and its transformation; moreover, looking at media and artefacts beyond the medium of literature that, too, demonstrate the increasing interest in space and mapping during that time, such as maps, mapinspired accessories or development plans, will not only enhance the reading experience but will also demonstrate the significance of spatiality for literary studies. To provide students with theoretical background and subject-specific terminology, the essay will present useful methodologies of approaching literary spaces and will also look at ways to effectively incorporate key texts of spatial studies, for instance by Michel de Certeau (“Walking in the City”). In that way, the course links literary and cultural studies with spatial and urban studies and will give students valuable insights into eighteenth-century life in the English capital. The following overview of the course design and the primary texts discussed in class shall not only function to comprehend the conceptualization of the course for readers of this essay, but also for students taking the course. As recent studies on “the power of transparency”2 have shown, making learning processes visible for students has positive effects on learning in general. So, by identifying and outlining the contents, objectives and methods of any course to students, the learning progress can effectively increase.

Session

Topic

1

Introductory Session

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objectives, expectations, overview

2

Historical Context

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historical markers for the Period political and historical catalysts for London’s urbanization (Restoration, Great Fire, Great Plague, Rebuilding of London) from ashes to phoenix: rebuilding of London (Christopher Wren)

•

•

3

Theoretical Context I

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geocriticism as an approach to the study of spaces and places (Robert Tally, Bertrand Westphal) factors shaping literary representations of eighteenth-century London

Session

Topic

4

Literary Context

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overview of genres dealt with in class (poetry, prose), writing styles (satire, novel, periodicals), authorship (e.g. hack writers, male and female authors, Scriblerus Club)

5

First Approach to Literary London via Poetry

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e.g. Jonathan Swift “Description of a City Shower” e.g. William Wordsworth “Upon Westminster Bridge”

• 6

Theoretical Context II

•

• 7

The Art of Walking as Mode of Perceiving and Experiencing the City

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• 8

The Art of Walking as Mode of Perceiving and Experiencing the City

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9

Cultural Context: The Public Sphere I

•

10

Cultural Context: The Public Sphere II

• •

• • •

11

12

Hack Writers and Grub Street Writings: The Dark and Vulgar City

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Beyond Literature

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•

• • 13

Seminar Recap

literary representations of the city as blends of fact and fiction (Wolfgang Iser), urban imaginaries (Edward Soja) urban studies, the city in literature John Gay: Trivia. Or the Art of Walking the Streets of London male pedestrian mobility Anonymous: The Midnight Ramble Frances Burney: Evelina female pedestrian mobility pleasure gardens in eighteenth-century London the art of promenading coffee house culture in eighteenth-century London periodicals (The Spectator, The Gentleman’s Magazine, Lady Magazine) Tom Brown: Amusements Serious and Comical Ned Ward: The London Spy William Hogarth: engravings visual culture accessorizing the city

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As a detailed description of how each session is designed would extend the limits of this essay, in what follows, I shall first remark briefly on the overall course design before focusing on some aspects and issues that are linked to methodologies and pedagogical strategies of teaching space. In particular, I will concentrate on the theoretical framework of a geocritical approach that forms the foundation of the course, as well as on some basic thoughts on approaches to literary representations of London.

Structure of the course The course is designed to enable students to understand eighteenth-century literary London in its many layers and contexts, with a particular emphasis on literature and literary representations of the city. Moreover, to not only make room for but also to foster individual reading responses, self-responsibility and competencies regarding the reading and interpreting of literary representations of space, the course takes on a student-centered approach. It is structured in a way that the sessions build on each other and are interconnected. This means that in the first third of the course, theoretical and contextual foundations have to be built in order to enable a meaningful engagement with the primary texts and to facilitate the reading process of these texts as the course progresses. At the end of the course, students should generally be able to employ strategies to approach literary spaces, and should particularly have a good knowledge about the diversity of literary representations of eighteenth-century London as well as an understanding of social, historical and cultural circumstances that played a role in shaping these texts. As the course focuses on one particular space – London – during one particular period – the eighteenth-century – it is imperative that students are provided with a substantial knowledge of historical and cultural content. The figure of the rising phoenix that also gives the course its title serves as a symbol for London’s rebirth after its destruction serves as a starting point for getting acquainted with the period. Ensuing from the discussion of the phoenix as a symbol for the rise of London during the eighteenth century, historical and cultural context, such as historical markers for the period or catalysts for the urbanization of London should predominantly be discussed at the beginning of the course, but should also be incorporated time and again to ensure that students can relate to the primary texts more easily. Recommendable monographs to provide students with enough background knowledge are, for instance, White’s London in the Eighteenth Century, Buchholz and Ward’s London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750, Hollis’s London Rising: The Men Who Made Modern London and, especially, O’Byrne’s Walking, Rambling and Promenading in Eighteenth – Century London: A Literary and Cultural History.3 With an emphasis on the literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London, it needs to be acknowledged that reading literature always also involves reacting individually and subjectively to the real-and-imagined worlds created via that medium. Students therefore need to be made acquainted with effective and appropriate reading strategies and should be encouraged to challenge their habitual ways of

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leisurely reading. However, a first principle step to provide guidance for students must be to structure the syllabus in a way that the complexity of the primary texts increases along with the progress of the course and that different genres are dealt with one after the other. Moreover, as the selection of primary texts for the course is indeed quite diverse and covers different genres, students ought to be given reading assistance, for instance by acquainting them with appropriate and effective reading strategies. In her monograph Cognitive Principles, Critical Practice: Reading Literature at University, Susanne Reichl, too, stresses the importance of addressing reading strategies at university.4 Following her arguments, students of literature should 1. recognize their active role in the reading process, 2. be aware of where difficulties in reading literature might lie and what one could do about it and 3. monitor comprehension during the reading process.5 Especially the latter is a crucial part of the course: In the form of mandatory reading responses, students are asked to hand in remarks, comments, questions or anything that strikes them as worth mentioning during the reading process for each text read in class. In that way, the teacher cannot only raise the level of commitment, but can also track where difficulties might lie and which aspects students find especially intriguing. Course sessions should therefore be composed accordingly and should consider both the interests and deficiencies of the students. While most of the reading for the course needs to be done at home, activities in class also follow the student-centered approach, most notably by employing forms of cooperative learning. Particularly when it comes to breaking down the layers of a text, assigning different tasks to smaller groups can result in a more detailed and deeper understanding (not to mention general advantages of cooperative learning such as increased level of commitment, positive interdependency, self- and peerresponsibility and a higher level of motivation).67

Geocriticism and the study of real-and-imagined cities At least since Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City,8 the city as one particular category of space, urban space, has been one major focus of spatial studies and literary studies. Within this research there can be found a number of different currents and trends that are concerned with questions of mapping, exploring and analyzing spatial data and literary referentiality. One of these approaches has been proposed by Westphal9 and Tally10 who call for a “geo-centered rather than egocentered approach” to the study (and teaching) of space. Thus, they argue, “one may undertake a geocritical study of a city, a region, a territory, and so on, rather than studying a given author’s treatment of that place.”11 Because a geo-critical approach to literary cities serves as starting point for the course, it is essential that students are made familiar with it from the very beginning. The benefits of this approach for the study of a given period and its literary and cultural context lie in the possibility to teach a period from a broader perspective. In other words, it is not only one author or one literary phenomenon of a period that students get

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exposed to, but authors of different age, class, gender, rank and reputation.12 As the course syllabus above shows, students will hence read primary texts from across genres and from a range of canonical as well as non-canonical authors. In that way, the reading list not only reflects the diversity of London experiences during the period, but also fulfils necessary prerequisites for a geocritical approach, in the course of which students will gain access to the multiple dimensions and variety of manifestations of literature, culture and society during the eighteenth century. With a focus on literature, the main aim of a geocritical approach is “to understand the real and fictional spaces that we inhabit, cross through, imagine, survey, modify, celebrate, disparage, and on and on in an infinite variety.”13 In order to reach such an understanding, Tally and Westphal’s methodology of geocriticism principally rests on four elements: a multi-focalization of places, a poly-sensuous approach to places, a stratigraphic vision of places and an intertextuality of places, of which the former two are fundamental for the approach taken in the course.14 A multi-focalization of literary spaces acknowledges that a literary text takes only one singular position among many possible others and, therefore, a real world source can be translated into a variety of fictional representations, each one potentially offering a different viewpoint and different ways of world-making.15 Hence, “the world is divided – at least in the universe of fiction – into a plurality of possible worlds in terms of representation.”16 This also means that different fictional worlds can coexist in the same space and time, and that, emphasizing the link between the study of space and the study of literature once more, literary texts can provide different visions or versions of a spatial reality. In this context, Samuel Johnson’s well-known observation “How different a place London is to different people!” beautifully pinpoints the crux of geocriticism and, as an authentic voice from the period, points towards the colorful and dynamic literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London. Following not only Tally and Westphal, but also Iser’s assumption that literature is characterized by an infiniteness of which a single text is just one of many other possible representations, students should furthermore be made familiar with the idea that literary representations of the city appear in kaleidoscopic manifestations of the “real” London that existed outside of literature.1718 By using the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, attention is drawn to the fact that although eighteenth-century London as a material entity with its streets, buildings, river, public establishments, etc. remains the same, the perception and experience of the city and its manifestation in literature is subject to change and depends on various factors that to uncover poses the biggest but also the most interesting challenges. In that regard, Soja’s concept of “real-and-imagined” cities19 (= visions of the city in which factual descriptions of reality are enriched with subjective interpretations of the latter), prove to be helpful terms for students to describe the complex blends of fact and fiction of literary London. In fact, in the primary texts selected for this course, factors shaping literary representations of London are quite visible: Are street activities like ballad-singers or football in Gay’s Trivia, for instance, only depicted as nuisances because the Londoner walker thinks of himself as someone superior? In how far does the influence of alcohol in Ned Ward’s The London Spy distort the nightly experiences of “coffee

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houses”? To what extent do Evelina’s naïve and romantic expectations of city life or her gender exacerbate her experiences of and in London? By approaching the texts in such a way, it will be fascinating to detect how sensory experiences, emotions, mood, memories but also age, gender and class affiliation can shape the vision of the city and result in unique experiences and literary representations of the same. Hence, students should come to comprehend that although the extra-textual reality remains similar for each text, the fictional reality created via the agency that experiences London and his or her subjective experiences of the city marks London as a place of multiple visions. While the texts are clearly anchored in the extra-textual reality of eighteenth-century London, referentiality (a link with the referential world20) can be established in various ways, such as via topographical references to buildings, streets or landscape specifics, via observations of cultural specifics like public walks, pleasure gardens, coffee houses and via topical events like Bartholomew Fair. As a consequence, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Covent Garden, the Monument, the Royal Exchange, Bedlam, Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens, St. James’s Park and many other London landmarks make regular appearances in the texts and allow students to easily decode the texts’ referentiality. In that way, each text remains a subjectivized version of a London that also existed in reality and that (contemporary) readers recognized or were able to relate to. As a result, the London envisioned in the texts rests on its own intra-textual reality that relies on an extra-textual reality on the one hand and subjective, fictionalized impressions of that reality on the other. Hence, the real dimensions of a literary city, established through topographical references, and the fictional dimensions of a literary city, established through subjective and fictionalized descriptions and experiences of the city, together form an imaginary construct that relies as much on the world outside the text as on the world inside the text. Indeed, the perceiving agency of each text, or the focalizer,21 to use a term of narrative theory,22 plays a significant role in creating the London imaginaries: in his or her experiences, the geographical, the material, the psychological and the emotional dimensions of urban explorations are merged. Although the focalizer plays an important role in all the primary texts selected for the course, it obtains a particularly intriguing function in the texts focusing on walking as one mode of making the city accessible: A sequence comprising three sessions will therefore deal with the art of walking as one particular mode of perceiving and experiencing eighteenth-century London.23 Three texts that feature so-called “London Walkers,”24 an eighteenth-century precursor of the flâneur, mark an intense encounter with the street – and cityscape – of eighteenth-century London. By employing the walker as an agency through whom the city is represented, these texts allow the reader to almost literally follow the London walkers’ footsteps through the city, which facilitates the access to literature from the period: students are mentally placed amidst the urban landscape and are directly confronted with intense sensory experiences of the city, fleeting encounters with strangers, the density of the crowds or the dangers of walking. While students discover the implications of walking through the city at dawn, midday or during the night in John Gay’s Trivia,25 Frances Burney’s Evelina and the anonymous Midnight Ramble rather bluntly outline the

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implications of female pedestrian mobility and the sexualization of female walking through the city. In this context, it can also be interesting to include mapping projects of the field of Digital Humanities (e.g. “Mapping Literary London”) in the discussion to enhance the reading experience. These projects map the mobility and walking patterns of literary figures through (urban) space, and visualize how these figures move through the city, where they linger, which places they repeatedly visit, etc. A look at these can spark interesting discussions, for example about how certain areas of public space were forbidden terrain for women or the cultural and social significance of public areas like pleasure gardens.

Conclusion As the essay has shown, the course is designed to approach eighteenth-century London and its literary landscape from various angles. Over the whole course, students develop strategies to approach literary representations of the city. By working with these strategies, students are encouraged to acknowledge the stratigraphic vision of the city that geocriticism promotes on the one hand and to acquire methodological tools to uncover the manifold layers of literary London on the other. Furthermore, these strategies, which make the study of space a subject of discussion, also facilitate an approach to spaces and places in general and can be employed in other contexts, outside the specific place and time of eighteenth-century London, as well. Despite the course’s emphasis on literary representations of the city, it is my opinion that a holistic understanding of the English capital during the period can only be attained if students are made aware of developments also beyond the medium of literature. Therefore, other media conveying a similar sense of the rise of urbanization and metropolitanism can be used to not only enhance the reading experiences, but also to make students aware that the manifold urban developments that characterized life in eighteenth-century London affected multiple modes of expression. An encounter, therefore, with the visual arts (especially eighteenth-century engravings of urban life) as well as with the increasing popularity of accessories that aimed at marketing the city26 (a fan displaying contemporary maps of London, for instance), provide students with interesting and fascinating links to literary visions of the city. Conclusively, only by taking into account cultural, historical and political contexts, students can reach an understanding of the literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London and of the significance of this period in the history of the English capital so that as the course is completed, they can truly comprehend the scope of Johnson’s notorious observation of the diversity of London experiences.

Notes 1 The long eighteenth century is a term often used by British historians. It extends the calendar definition of 1700–1800 by considering influential historical markers that defined the period. While historians extend the eighteenth century to start with either the accession of Charles II (the Restoration) in 1660 or the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and end it with the Reform Act of 1832, literary scholars often see the publication of Paradise Lost

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in 1667 as a starting point (cf. C. U. M. Smith, “Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” in Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience, eds. C. U. Harry Whitaker, M. Smith, and Stanley Finger (Berlin: Springer, 2007). 15–28; Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Amy Mulnix, “The Power of Transparency in Your Teaching,” Faculty Focus (2016), accessed April 23. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/powertransparency-teaching/ Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (London: Random House, 2012); Robert Buchholz and Joseph Ward, London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Leo Hollis, London Rising: The Men Who Made Modern London (New York: Walker & Co, 2008); Alison O’Byrne, Walking, Rambling and Promenading in Eighteenth – Century London: A Literary and Cultural History (Ph.D. dissertation, University of York, York, 2003); O’Byrne’s monograph also gives interesting insights into why literature about walking and experiencing the city became increasingly popular during that time. Susanne Reichl, Cognitive Principles, Critical Practice: Reading Literature at University (Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2009), 235, 245. Cf. Ibid., 249–257. David Johnson and Roger Johnson, Cooperative Learning in the Classroom (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, University of Michigan, 1994). In the session on the public sphere with a focus on periodicals (session 11), for instance, forms of cooperative learning can allow for a comparison of different periodicals and their investigation in regard to target audience and contents. In my class, students have truly enjoyed reading and comparing articles from The Spectator, The Gentleman or Lady’s Magazine. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Robert T. Tally Jr., Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Westphal, Geocritism, xiv. In this respect, the contrast between hack writers like Tom Brown or Ned Ward and writers like John Gay, who belonged to elitist literary circles (Scriblerus Club) is particularly interesting. Ibid., 10. For detailed explanations of each of these elements, see ibid., 111f. Cf. Ansgar Nünning, “Welten – Weltbilder – Weisen der Welterzeugung: Zum Wissen der Literatur und zur Aufgabe der Literaturwissenschaft,” in Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, eds. Renate Stauf and Conrad Wiedemann (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), 65–79. Also see the concept of possible worlds in literary studies, which examines possible worlds and literary universes created by fiction: Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978); Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Westphal, Geocriticism, 117. Cf. Wolfgang Iser, “Mimesis – Emergenz,” Mimesis und Simulation, eds. Andreas Kablitz and Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg: Rombach, 1998), 669–684, 670. In order not to overstrain undergraduate students with spatial theories, especially considering that a majority will presumably be unfamiliar with approaching literature from the perspective of spatial studies, the theoretical scaffolding should be served in chunks. Thereby, it is necessary to preprocess the material that students will need for comprehending a geocritical approach and to let students read excerpts from Tally’s and Westphal’s monographs (e.g. the introductions) at home for preparation. Outsourcing the first confrontation with geocriticism will allow for a deeper and more reflected discussion in

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class and will leave room for questions and the clarification of aspects that students found yet obscure while reading. A classroom discussion that involves breaking down the most important aspects of geocriticism will serve as a necessary and helpful basis for approaching the primary texts in the course of the seminar and can be consulted by students at any time. Edward Soja, “Toward a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality,” in Communicating in the Third Space, eds. Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (New York: Routledge, 2009), 49–61. Tally, Geocritical Explorations, xv. Cf. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988 [1983]). Terms of literary/narrative theory should also be introduced in undergraduate courses, as they can facilitate the understanding of literature. The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory defines internal focalisation as the “perspectival restriction and orientation of narrative information relative to somebody’s (usually, a character’s) perception, imagination, knowledge, or point of view [. . .] Hence, focalization theory covers the various means of regulating, selecting, and channeling narrative information, particularly of seeing events from somebody’s point of view, no matter how subjective or fallible this point of view might turn out to be (see RELIABILITY)” (Manfred Jahn, “Focalization,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 173–177. In this sequence, the art and mode of walking can be theoretically substantiated by looking at de Certeau’s famous essay “Walking in the City” in his work The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Cf. Catharina Löffler, Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in Eighteenth-Century London (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017), 90f. In this context, the famous engravings by William Hogarth Four Times of Day, which are a direct quote of Gay’s Trivia, can be discussed in class to demonstrate the manifestations of urban experiences in the visual arts. Cf. O’Byrne, Walking, Rambling and Promenading, 1.

12 INTERROGATING THE URBAN CRISIS Teaching Detroit in literature Frank D. Rashid

In 1990, Ze’ev Chafets, in his sensationalistic Devil’s Night and Other True Tales of Detroit, labeled Detroit America’s “first major Third-World City.”1 In 2011, then presidential candidate Newt Gingrich proclaimed that President Barack Obama employed “the same destructive political model that destroyed the city of Detroit.” He added, “The Obama system’s going to lead us down the path to Detroit and destruction.”2 In 2013, Detroit’s state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr pronounced, “We [the people of Detroit and its leaders] dug the hole,” and “we,” not the federal or state government, would have to dig ourselves out.3 The city, its leaders, and its residents are routinely blamed for the city’s imperiled situation. The subtext, especially for right-wing politicians like Gingrich, is that African Americans, up to and including Barack Obama, cannot manage their own affairs and that this majority black city is an aberration, unrelated to the rest of the country or to free-market capitalism. In these narratives, Detroit becomes a cautionary tale, evidence of what happens under “liberal” policies or African American leadership. Detroit is unrelated to the rest of America; it has a unique set of problems for which its (black) people and (black) leaders bear responsibility. Consistent with these narratives, those perpetuated in Detroit’s suburbs – and even in the city itself – blame the city’s social and economic problems on a single event: the 1967 Rebellion; on a single mayor, Coleman Young or Kwame Kilpatrick; or on the people of Detroit themselves. These views rest on longstanding myths about Detroit’s economic and racial history: that “good times” accompanied the growth of industry and commerce driven by profit-seeking but conscientious corporate leaders, that African Americans drove out the city’s white population, that a poor minority citizenry cannot govern itself, and that 1960s social programs created an unhealthy reliance on government leading to Detroit’s current economic crisis. Detroit scholars directly confront these narratives by demonstrating how decisions of business and industrial leaders after World War II along with long-standing

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federal government policies led to the deindustrialization and depopulation of the city, intensifying inequality, unrest, and financial crisis. Native Detroiter Thomas J. Sugrue demonstrates that Detroit’s problems arose two decades earlier than 1967, when the auto industry – the presence of which had spurred the city’s sprawling early twentieth-century growth – engaged in rapid automation and decentralization of its operations, moving its factories to the suburbs, to other parts of the US, and to other nations, causing unprecedented decline in industrial employment for a city that had depended on it.4 Manufacturing employment declined by over 38 percent and production employment by 47 percent from 1947 to 1967 and continued to plummet in the succeeding decades until today Detroit has fewer than ten percent of the manufacturing jobs that it had after World War II.5 At the exact same time, the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration energetically supplied longterm, low-interest loans only for whites, almost entirely in newly established suburban areas. Another Detroit-born scholar, john a. powell, describes the program: In the 1940s and 1950s, the Federal Housing Administration pursued an explicit policy against granting mortgages for homes in minority or integrated neighborhoods and preferred to back new construction rather than the purchase of existing units. Essentially, the FHA paid whites to leave the central cities and confined blacks to the central cities, which were, in turn, divested by the federal government and private capital.6 As historian David M. P. Freund demonstrates, white families often found it less costly to own their own homes in the suburbs than to rent an apartment in the city.7 This continuous disinvestment by industry and government was soon replicated by the city’s retail and construction sectors and even by its most firmly established religious denomination.8 Although African Americans, expecting jobs and encouraged by Supreme Court decisions curtailing racial restrictions in housing, continued to come to the city, the overall population was declining dramatically.9 To serve the sprawling suburban population, federal, state, and local governments developed an expensive network of expressways that decimated city neighborhoods, facilitated movement further away from the city, and left comparatively few public dollars for public transit.10 By 1967, long before the administrations of Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick, and well before Detroit became a majority black city, its decline was firmly and unalterably established. As Sugrue demonstrates, the supposedly “liberal” policies of the 1960s had been so diluted by compromises with the political right that they were no match for the manifold social problems that had been growing since World War II.11 In my Detroit in Literature course, the students and I examine the ways that poetry and fiction set in the city illuminate these conditions, challenging the popular narratives, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes anticipating scholarly analysis. We analyze the impact of racial inequality even in times of prosperity, the ways that industrialization and deindustrialization – not the actions of black residents – fueled the burning of Detroit, the ways that public policy and corporate behavior

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produced the devastation of the last seven decades.12 Interrogating familiar, popular narratives provides a context for analyzing the continuing challenges faced by this maligned and misunderstood American city, creating a focused experience of the relationship between place, history, and literature. The narrative describing Detroit’s fall from a prosperous, harmonious past is pervasive in and around the city. Robert Hayden’s Paradise Valley poems – composed in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s – demonstrate this view’s incompleteness. In a brief memoir, he remarks that “the good old days in Detroit had never been good,”13 and the poems he set in the supposedly prosperous 1920s emphasize the struggles of the adults who tried to “shelter” the neighborhood’s children, even though “rats [were] fighting in their walls.”14 Oppressive work and relentless poverty led these African-American Detroiters, “so harshened after each unrelenting day,” to “shouting” anger. Nevertheless, they develop strategies for survival and preserve their visions of a better life at least for their children, one of whom still “feels their Mosaic eyes upon him,” even though they are long dead.15 Jeffrey Eugenides examines this same phenomenon in his novel Middlesex in which the narrator imagines the first impressions of his Greek grandparents who arrived in Detroit in 1922. After re-creating the “swirl and hubbub” of a booming downtown, the grandson – from the perspective of much a later decade – reflects: What they didn’t see were the workers sleeping on the streets because of the housing shortage, and the ghetto just to the east . . . teeming with the city’s African Americans, who weren’t allowed to live anywhere else. They didn’t see, in short, the seeds of the city’s destruction . . . because they were part of it, too, all these people coming from everywhere to cash in on Henry Ford’s five-dollar-a-day promise.16 Eugenides emphasizes that the workers without housing; the forced segregation of Detroit’s African American community into crowded, decrepit housing; and the explosive arrival of immigrants to the city are “part of ” its “destruction.” Hidden within the temporary, selective prosperity are the “seeds” of its downfall. As Sugrue writes, “Capitalism generates economic inequality and . . . African Americans have disproportionately borne the impact of that inequality.”17 Most African American Detroiters endured the impact of systemic forces ensuring that they would not prosper even in supposedly good times. Of course, Detroit had those relatively high-paying factory jobs, but, as Sugrue notes, African-Americans worked in the “dirtiest and most dangerous” automobile plant departments.18 Careful reading of Dudley Randall’s poem “George” and then of later auto factory poems by Jim Daniels leads to class discussion about the ultimate purpose of a life of hard factory work even when considered a rite of passage.19 For workers of all races, these poems illustrate, the assembly line could be dehumanizing, debilitating, and ultimately purposeless. The desperation of not having a job matched only the desperation of having one. As one worker said after

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finally securing a Ford Rouge plant job, “I waited five months in that goddamned parking lot across the street for this?”20 Philip Levine writes of 1940s and 1950s Detroiters drawn to jobs they need but cannot stand. In “What Work Is,” he describes this paradox of work, experienced by those “standing in the rain in a long line/waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.” They know “that somewhere ahead/a man is waiting who will say, ‘No,/we’re not hiring today.’”21 Modern work for Levine is the frightening, dangerous antithesis of warmth, family, and love. In another poem, he describes a 1951 incident: a plain woman from West Virginia began suddenly to curse this life. She untied the rag that hid her graying hair and wiped her face and still the words came. “It’s shit. That’s just what it is, shit.” No one answered or took her in his arms or held her hand, and before long she’d bowed her head to the wheel that polished the new chromed tubes, and all our hours passed a moment at a time and disappeared somewhere in the vast unchartered spaces between the moons of our blood.22 In an interview, Levine describes a young man, newly arrived from the South, with whom he worked on the Cadillac plant’s assembly line. Levine discovers him weeping after work in a men’s room stall: “I’m lonesome. I don’t know anyone. I hate this job,” he confesses. “We all hate it,” Levine responds, “It’s terrible work.”23 Students – some of them auto workers themselves, others the children of auto workers – reflect on the experience of factory work, sometimes arguing with its literary description, but usually validating it. Levine’s 1963 poem “An Abandoned Factory, Detroit” also critiques this process. Levine focuses on the abandoned Chevy Gear and Axle Plant where he once worked, regarding it as a “gray monument to [the] common sense” that both built and abandoned the plant and its workers. The speaker stands before a fence that, like everything else, has outlived its intended purpose: to control workers and curtail protest: “Fears of idle hands,/Of protest, men in league, and of the slow/Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.”24 Past the fence, he observes the factory’s great presses “in air suspended, caught/In the sure margin of eternity.” Now able to count the spokes on wheels of machines that once moved too fast to be seen, the speaker can estimate “the loss of human power,/Experienced and slow, the loss of years,/The gradual decay of dignity.” Aware of the ultimate purposelessness of the entire enterprise, the speaker concludes: “Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;/Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears/Which might have

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served to grind their eulogy.” No longer marking their time for their hourly pay, the obsolete workers who remain have outlasted the obsolete products they built, and the obsolete factory machinery – which might at least have paid ironic tribute to these workers’ time and lives – now stands motionless and silent. As Sugrue points out, this obsolescence didn’t just happen. Eight years before this poem appeared, in 1955, Henry Ford’s grandson, Henry Ford II, president of Ford Motor Company, had expressed somewhat differently than Levine, the “common sense” of building and replacing: “Obsolescence,” he said, “is the very hallmark of progress.” He added: “The faster we obsolete products, machines, and antiquated, costly means of working, the faster we raise our living standards and national wealth.” Ford acknowledged that “in some areas where industries have been partly obsoleted whole communities may suffer real hardship,” but, by his logic, this was necessary, since, he said, he knew of “no direct way . . . to avoid by private means the dislocations that come from technological obsolescence.”25 As Ford understood, the abandonment of factories and their workers would necessitate the abandonment of cities, which – like machines, products, and workers – were inevitably regarded as obsolete. Detroit’s abandonment was anticipated and its impact understood by its corporate leaders in the name of “progress.”26 The abandoned factory became the metonymic emblem of Detroit. Just as popular versions of Detroit’s past ignore the racial injustice and the hardships endured in the auto plants even in prosperous times, so, too, they overlook other indications that all was not well in the city long before July 23, 1967, when, according to popular myth, black Detroit residents, for no good reason, went on a self-destructive rampage that forever changed the city. Student familiarity with this myth acts as the context for contrary evidence in the literature of the 1950s and ’60s by writers who anticipate the later findings of scholars like Sugrue, powell, and Freund. Novels and poems question American free market and corporate welfare logic favoring corporations and their leaders at the expense of the poor and middle class with little regard for economic, civic, or environmental health. In class, we discuss these literary tales of exploitation of Detroit and Detroiters by those who most profit from the city. One year after the 1967 insurrection, Levine returned to his birthplace and contemplated another auto plant, the Ford Rouge, still in operation, though with a much diminished workforce. In “Coming Home, Detroit, 1968,” the Rouge plant illustrates the impact of industrial “progress” as Levine traces industrial damage to the city and its people: As the poem begins, emissions from the Rouge block the sun in universal sulfurous “gray” emitted from all automobile production: “A winter Tuesday, the city pouring fire,/Ford Rouge sulfurs the sun, Cadillac, Lincoln,/ Chevy gray.”27 The poem addresses the ageless Detroit worker, who can “recall” what has been “lost” in the “snowstorm” of industrial history: Near the freeway you stop and wonder what came off, recall the snowstorm where you lost it all,

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the wolverine, the northern bear, the wolf caught out, ice and steel raining from the foundries in a shower of human breath. The fires of industrial civilization, like an ice age, have a dramatic impact on the environment. The area’s previous inhabitants have been eliminated by “a shower/of human breath,” the “progress” of civilization, which affects the remaining inhabitants whose faces are “charred.” The poem’s ending recalls its title and highlights the importance of the year “1968”: The charred faces, the eyes boarded up, the rubble of innards, the cry of wet smoke hanging in your throat, the twisted river stopped at the color of iron. We burn this city every day. Levine refuses to consider 1967’s rebellion in isolation. The poem does not attribute Detroit violence only to the burning and looting of July 1967, but to the destructive forces that accompanied the migration of Europeans to this place. For three centuries, “we” have burned “this city every day.” Joyce Carol Oates, too, places 1967’s violence in a broad context, seeing Detroit not as separated from the rest of the nation but as a quintessentially American city, which stimulates class discussion of the ways in which Detroit’s distinctive qualities reflect cultural values and behaviors. In her 1969 novel them, Oates probes the psychology and sexuality of inequality. Through the character of Jules Wendall and his relationship with the wealthy Nadine Green, a young woman from Detroit’s exclusive suburb, Grosse Pointe, Oates treats the violence of Detroit as a distinctively American response to economic inequality. Jules’s desire for the “nieces and daughters of the [Grosse] Pointes” in general and his anxiety that Nadine in particular “never, never . . . would be at home in his arms”28 echo Clyde Griffiths’ “stinging sense of what it was to want and not to have” as he agonizes over the beautiful and wealthy Sondra Finchley in Dreiser’s American Tragedy.29 Later in them, as Jules drives to a secret meeting with Nadine, his reflections resemble those of the aspiring Jay Gatsby. He can change the past; he can create himself: “As he drove along, his despair lifted. So long as he owned his own car he could always be in control of his fate – he was fated to nothing. He was a true American. . . . [H]e was second generation to no one. He was his own ancestors.”30 As students recognize, automobile ownership, appropriately for this Detroit novel, becomes integral to Jules’s dreams. Nadine herself is like a demented Daisy Buchanan. Where Daisy’s wealth leaves her with an empty life and a blank future temporarily filled through her dalliance with her lower-class former lover Gatsby, Nadine – Greg Johnson says her name “suggests a moral void”31 – tries to fill her vapid suburban emptiness by having a torrid affair with her lower-class former lover, Jules. Daisy’s actions lead inevitably to Gatsby’s

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death. Nadine is more direct: When Jules cannot satisfy her violent sexual desire, he becomes obsolete, and she treats him as other women might dream of treating their inadequate men: She shoots him. Oates sees Detroit as an American city, and the violence of its residents emerges from their unfulfilled American dreams. After recovering from his gunshot wounds, Jules comes under the sway of an anarchistic sociology professor at Wayne State University and participates in the 1967 riot, eventually killing a policeman. Students question why Oates focuses this novel on a white family to tell a Detroit story that is more typically regarded as African American. (African-Americans appear primarily as objects of racist hatred by Jules’s lower class mother.) I have argued that Oates’s attention to white Detroiters illustrates that economic inequality leads to rage and violence regardless of race, as do impossible American dreams fostered by the characters’ “rising expectations”: material, social, and even sexual. More recent literary works continue to reject the dismissive superficial narratives often used to explain Detroit. Lawrence Joseph has been especially critical of such narratives, writing in a 1990 review of Chafets’s Devil’s Night for The Nation: Detroit isn’t, as Ze’ev Chafets advertises, “the first major third world city in the United States.” Detroit is the American city that most manifestly reflects the racial segregation that permeates American society. Contrary to what too many of the media’s and Chafets’s images tell us, Detroit represents ill-distributed wealth, racial hatred, violence, drugs, poverty, unemployment and social disintegration little, if any, more than other urban areas in America. Because of its unique history, Detroit most intensely represents the consequences of systemic citywide racial segregation.32 Instead of popular media images perpetuated by Chafets and others, Joseph recommends “honest works about Detroit” – in literature, music, and history – works that offer “criticisms of its mediated imagery” and “probe beneath the surface mythologies into essential American realities.”33 Since the 1970s, Joseph’s poems have explored Detroit’s violence, and in his recent work, he surveys the time and space of the city, like Oates, placing it in the context of larger systemic and ideological forces. In his earlier poems, Joseph attaches this violence to his family’s Detroit grocery store, and frequently mentions the shooting of his father during a hold-up. In a 1988 poem, “By the Way,” he shifts the focus. After describing the shooting, he comments wryly, “The event went uncelebrated among hundreds/of felonies in that city that day.”34 Of course, this incident says something about Detroit, but by omitting the city’s name, Joseph universalizes the issues raised in this poem, at the center of which the places this pointed question: What if poverty and anger and the desire for thrills, and tribal attitudes, exist not only on the streets but innately

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– inherent, if you will, within the boundaries of the nation, social and economic classes, our time?35 More recent poems continue these questions, and in a 2012 Detroit poem, “Here in a State of Tectonic Tension,” Joseph relates Detroit’s geography to that of Istanbul. Detroit was, Joseph states, “a natural place for Ford and Olds to open factories.” The poem links street violence with that of industry: Whacked-out, stamped-out connecting rods, the steady blown-out flare of furnaces, hammer-die brought down on anvil-die, oil-holes drilled and oilgrooves cut – Fordism was Gramsci’s word to describe mass assembly based on systems of specialized machines operating within organizational domains of vertically integrated conglomerates fed by small and medium-sized units coordinated by methods of marketing exchange – an epical, systemic violence. Joseph juxtaposes this industrial violence with an ugly attack by whites of a black man in the 1943 Detroit riot and Depression-era police attacks against labor union members, demonstrating that “soon several new/regimes of redistributed wealth would alter the way/capitalism proceeded,” generating “the long depression” since the 1950s. He surveys “the decay” which “apparently/has frightened the smart money away” before mapping the city’s long record of post-industrial erasure: Ionic pillars carved with grapes and vine leaves no longer there, deserted houses of gigantic bulk, in which it seems incredible anyone could ever have lived, no longer there, Dodge Main’s nocturnal gold vapors no longer there, the constellated bright lights reflected on the Rouge River’s surface no longer there. Narco-capital techno-compressed and gone viral, spread into a state of tectonic tension and freaky abstractions – it’ll scare the fuck out of you, is what it’ll do, anthropomorphically scaled down by the ferocity of its own obsolescence. Which of an infinity of reasons explain it? Which of an infinity of conflagrations implode its destruction?36 As Detroit emerges from bankruptcy and state control, students observe the ways the old narratives and their underlying myths emerge in new forms, and “the smart money” is returning with troubling implications for Detroit’s poor minority citizens, required once again to subsidize a dubious “renaissance” from which they will not benefit. Long-time residents – often poor and black – are being displaced from their long-time apartments and houses to make room for wealthy

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young professionals. By 2016, the state, county, and city will have subsidized billionaire sports team owners and their mercenary athletes with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for professional sports stadiums and arenas, while the city itself, operating under state-managed austerity, cannot maintain its parks and playgrounds, shutters its schools, lays off teachers, drastically reduces academic programs, closes or restricts operating hours at its libraries, shuts down its police and fire stations, and cuts and privatizes city services. The city engages in a planning process called “Detroit Future City,” that, as Wayne State University legal scholar Peter Hammer points out, fails “to adequately consider race and the history and context of racial conflict” responsible for the city’s current condition.37 Lifelong Detroiter Melba Joyce Boyd writes of similar efforts in the 1970s to use the city’s precious riverfront property for high-end apartments.38 Scholars, activists, and artists continue to challenge policies and prescriptions that benefit the wealthy and powerful, generating ever deeper inequality and injustice. The frustration of longtime Detroiters – among them the students and their professors – comes from knowing that these “solutions” willfully ignore the roots of the city’s crisis and exacerbate the conditions that have for decades fostered inequality for poor and middle-class Detroiters. Studying the literature of one’s own city encourages reconsideration of its political, social, and economic realities and of the physical texts that compose it. Through the semester, we use online maps and aerial imagery to visit the settings of the works we study. At the end of the semester, we ride in a van through these neighborhoods and industrial areas, reinterpreting this city we have long known and debating the complex relationship of literature and politics, art and urban life.

Notes I thank the many Marygrove College students with whom I have studied Detroit in Literature at both the graduate and undergraduate levels and the undergraduate senior seminar, Detroit Poets/Detroit Poems, since 2000. I also thank the approximately 300 students who have taken the undergraduate interdisciplinary course, Detroit and the Contemporary Urban Crisis, and my faculty colleagues Thomas Klug, Pao-yu Ching, Mary Byrnes, and the late Elaine Grover with whom I have taught this course since 1994. I am grateful for Marygrove College’s urban leadership vision, supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which encourages development of such courses and of interdisciplinary examination of urban subject matters. I thank, too, the scholars of Detroit literature and culture whose insights have informed the work of my students and me, among them Laurence Goldstein, Todd Duncan, Melba Joyce Boyd, M. L. Liebler, and David Sheridan. 1 Ze’ev Chafets, Devil’s Night and Other True Tales of Detroit (New York: Random House, 1990), 177. 2 Newt Gingrich, “Interview by David Gregory,” NBC’s Meet the Press (May 16, 2011), accessed April 8, 2017, www.nbcnews.com/id/43022759/ns/meet_the_presstranscripts/t/meet-press-transcript-may/#.WOkoZ4WcHIU. 3 Kevyn Orr, “Interview by Chris Wallace,” Fox News Sunday (July 21, 2013), accessed April 8, 2017, www.foxnews.com/transcript/2013/07/21/dr-ben-carson-rep-donna-edwardsdiscuss-fallout-zimmerman-verdict-kevyn-orr-detroits.html. Under questioning from Wallace, Orr, who is not from Detroit, acknowledged that Detroit’s problems were the

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products of larger forces occurring over sixty years but still focused on the last decade’s actions by the city’s leadership and the corruption of the Kwame Kilpatrick administration as the reasons for his assertion. Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). See Sugrue, Origins, 144, Table 5.2, “Decline in Manufacturing Employment in Detroit, 1947–1977.” Recent employment statistics come from “Industry by Sex and Median Earnings in The Past 12 Months (In 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) for the Civilian Employed Population 16 Years and Over 2011–2015: American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates,” American FactFinder: US Census, accessed March 27, 2017. john a. powell, “Race and Space: What Really Drives Metropolitan Growth,” Brookings Review 16, no. 4 (1998): 20–22. David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 134. On Detroit’s retail loss: “As early as 1947, Detroit was already losing jobs in the retail and wholesale sectors. In 1958, 66 percent of the region’s retail sales took place in the city, and only 34 percent in the suburbs. Five years later only 38 percent were urban and 62 percent suburban, and by 172 urban sales made up 20 percent of the regional total.” Freund, Colored Property, 22. In 1950, as Sugrue points out, Detroit’s population was 65 percent Roman Catholic. He estimates that the city’s “white population was closer to 75 or 80 percent Catholic” (213). This means that what is often called “white flight” was largely Catholic flight. As Michael Chateau, John O’Brien, and I argued in a 2005 op-ed, in these years, the Detroit Archdiocese “said little about the exodus; to some extent, it even led the way out of town. . . . The archdiocese did not foster integration in parishes or confront the fear leading many Catholics to move to segregated suburbs. Instead, the archdiocese accommodatingly built churches and schools further and further away from the city and its ‘problems.’” African Americans made up an increasing percentage of Detroit’s declining population. In 1950, Detroit’s African American population was 300,506 or 16.2 percent of the city’s total population. In 1960, 482,229 African Americans, 28.9 percent of the city’s 1,670,144 population called Detroit home. In 1970, 660,428 African Americans made up 44.5 percent of the city’s declining population of 1,511,482. See Sugrue, Origins, Table 1.1 “Detroit’s Population, 1910–1970,” 23. Gerald Frug, “The Legal Technology of Exclusion in America,” in The New Suburban History, eds. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 210. Sugrue, Origins, 59. Among the writers whose works are studied in my Detroit in Literature courses are Robert Hayden, Dudley Randall, Harriette Arnow, Philip Levine, Joyce Carol Oates, Naomi Long Madgett, Lawrence Joseph, Toi Derricotte, Jim Daniels, Melba Joyce Boyd, and Lolita Hernandez. Robert Hayden, Collected Prose, ed. Frederick Glaysher (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), 20. Robert Hayden, “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” in Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 1985), 164. Hayden, “Summertime and the Living,” Collected Poems, 39. See also my essay, “Robert Hayden’s Detroit Blues Elegies,” Callaloo 24, no. 1 (2000): 200–226. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (New York: Random House, 2002), 88. Sugrue, Origins, 5. Ibid., 99. Dudley Randall, “George,” Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall, ed. Melba Joyce Boyd (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 51. Among the many Jim Daniels factory poems that can be usefully compared with “George” are “Where I’m At: Factory Education,” “Old Green,” “Work Song: Factory Musical,” and “Hard Rock” all in Punching Out (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990).

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20 Henry Hampton, Steve Fayer, Joe Morton, WGBH-Boston, and The British Broadcasting Corporation, “A Job at Ford’s,” in The Great Depression, Part 1 (Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1993), videocassette. 21 Philip Levine, “What Work Is,” in What Work Is: Poems by Philip Levine (New York: Knopf, 1992), 18. 22 Philip Levine, “One,” in One for the Rose: Poems by Philip Levine (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999), 55. 23 Philip Levine, So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 103. 24 Philip Levine, “An Abandoned Factory, Detroit,” in On the Edge (Iowa City: Second Press, 1964), 25. 25 Henry Ford II, quoted in Sugrue, Origins,133–4, originally in the Detroit Free Press (April 29, 1955). 26 Two decades later, after the damage inflicted by all this abandonment became obvious, Ford tried to rectify the situation by investing – and urging others to invest – in a massive development, the Renaissance Center, with dubious results. 27 Philip Levine, “Coming Home, Detroit, 1968,” in New Selected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1993), 75. 28 Joyce Carol Oates, Them (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 275, 276. 29 Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: New American Library, 1964), 220. 30 Oates, Them, 374. 31 Greg Johnson, Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Plume, 1998), 165. 32 Lawrence Joseph, “Review of Devil’s Night and Other True Tales of Detroit by Ze’ev Chafets,” The Nation (December 17, 1990): 774–777. Web. Academic OneFile, accessed April 7, 2017. 33 Examples of such “honest works,” according to Joseph, are Diego Rivera’s famous murals representing Detroit industry in the Detroit Institute of Arts, historian B. J. Widick’s Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence, the two Detroit novels (them and Do with Me What You Will) by Oates, and two albums by Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On and Trouble Man. 34 Lawrence Joseph, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems, 1973–1993 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), 81. 35 Joseph, Codes, 82. I examine this and other Joseph Detroit poems in “Lawrence Joseph’s Detroit: The Shifting Story,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 77, no. 3 (2009): 885–903, reprinted, along with several other essays on Joseph and his work, as part of “Shifting Stories, Codes of Violence: Two Perspectives on Lawrence Joseph,” Jacket2 (2012), accessed April 8, 2017, http://jacket2.org/article/shifting-stories-codes-violence. 36 Lawrence Joseph, So Where Are We? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 16–18. 37 Lee Devito, “Peter Hammer Debates Detroit Future City,” Detroit Metro Times (March 3, 2014), accessed April 8, 2017, www.metrotimes.com/detroit/peter-hammer-debatesdetroit-future-city/Content?oid=2144158. Hammer is Executive Director of Wayne State University Law School’s Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights. He and his students have engaged in extensive study of the Detroit Future City plan. 38 Melba Joyce Boyd, “The View of Blue,” Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001, eds. Melba Joyce Boyd and M. L. Liebler (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 66–67.

13 PLACE AS PALIMPSEST Literary works and cultural-political resistance Andrea Quaid

The mapping project: an overview In my California literature graduate seminar, we explore place as dynamic sites of ever-resonate, palimpsestic past histories that remain present in the works we read, the cultural movements we study, the poetry readings we attend, and the streets we walk. Our course begins the discussion with readings from Henri Lefebvre’s “Social Space” and Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” to ignite thinking about place as constituted by social relations and practices.1 Next, we focus our attention specifically on how literary practices may make, or produce, a space. Possible place-making literary practices include public readings, community workshops and poems as protest posted on street lamps. We continue to orient our study of space and place with readings from Dolores Hayden. Hayden’s The Power of Place is a touchstone text for the course, which helps us consider place as constructed, regulated, always multiple and always active.2 Our literary texts range from Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit and accompanying commentary in Chester Himes’s essay, “Zoot Riots are Race Riots,” to Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s Starting from Loomis and Other Stories, an artist’s memoir that includes his time in the Tule Lake Internment Camp as a No-No Boy, to Barbara Jane Reyes’s Poeta in San Francisco.3 In this essay, I focus on our study of the Watts Writers Workshop and The Anansi Writers Workshop. A collaborative mapping project is the course’s central assignment. The goal is to foreground a spatial literary approach using digital humanities technology. Through doing this activity, historical context becomes a located, geographic-political context, and opens our analysis to exciting interpretive possibilities. Further, mapping becomes an activity rather than a received artifact. As well, students learn to experience their own textual production in a new, place-focused way. Because I teach the graduate seminar to Bard College, Masters of Arts in Teaching students who are

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taking discipline-specific course work in literature alongside education courses as they complete student teaching placements in Los Angeles Unified School District public schools, the mapping project offers a place-focused learning activity for them to use in their own classrooms.

The pedagogical standpoint It is right to begin an essay on education and place with a description of how I locate myself in the classroom. I practice an intersectional feminist pedagogy that affirms the constitutive social identities of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and ability and their significance in academic work. My standpoint is present in a series of questions that we use to analyze texts: What is the critical and creative text about? What is the lens and location you are engaging with it from? Or, who are you and why does this matter? How does this influence what you notice about a text? Can someone different from you have a different reading? How can these differences, as Audre Lorde suggests, be strengths?4 What relationships does the text silence, court, or make visible? What questions can you not not ask? What announces itself – as a concern or provocation to act? What do you need to voice – in a short paper, image, often overlooked historical fact or eclipsed point of view – in response to an assigned reading? I turn to Paulo Freire’s work to further explain a reading methodology that links student standpoint as a social location in the world to the reading of literary texts. In his essay, “The Importance of the Act of Reading,” I hear him propose a reading method predicated on asking questions and making connections between self and book, and the personal and the political.5 He posits a dialectical relationship between the word and the world, or between text and one’s lived experiences. He suggests children learn to read their world long before they learn to critically engage with a book. He claims, “Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world . . . this movement from the world to the word and from the word to the world is always present.”6 However, to achieve literacy is not to leave the world behind in favor the word. He suggests, “Reading is not exhausted merely by decoding the written word or written language, but rather anticipated by and extending into knowledge of the world. Reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world.”7 According to Freire, the two different but related scenes of reading remain in an ever deepening and “extending” relationship to each other. I see the word-world interpretative strategy manifest when we ask students examine connections between the text and self, and the text and the world. I use it when I ask students to write about a literary text in relation to their personal experience. The two epistemological activities make possible a meaningful criticality about the joys and inequities we face and the possibilities to critical consciousness as a means to intervene in injustice. In Freire’s literacy work, he foregrounds the political stakes of reading in their most expansive and interwoven senses.

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In accord, bell hooks writes alongside Freire’s educational politics when she advocates for teachers to “educate as the practice of freedom.”8 In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, she claims: • •

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To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.9

hooks speaks to working with the whole personhood of students. In addition, she suggests the engagement between teacher and student is one of listening in addition to instruction. She calls on feminist, anti-racist educators “to rethink teaching practices” and to “recognize each classroom as different, that strategies must constantly be changed, invented, reconceptualized to address each new teaching experience.”10 The mapping project grows out of such a listening practice as students asked for more expansive, integrated ways of reading with an attention toward engaging their own future literature students. I see the project as a way to introduce multiple reading methods in a way that asks students to develop both intellectual and creative modes of analysis.

Place as palimpsest: the mapping project To introduce the mapping project, we read excerpts from Hayden’s The Power of Place.11 Together we analyze her claim that space is shaped into place by humans as well as nature. We note how she explores the intersections of “cultural identity, social history, and urban design.”12 Highlighting human activity, Hayden suggests our social relations are spatial, both constituting and constituted by places. In this way, the making of space and place (or production of space, as her reading of Lefebvre makes clear) is a practice that may create roads and alternative pathways, repurpose buildings for nonintended uses, and established affective and actual spaces of belonging in a given community. Hayden emphasizes how this practice is always historical and political. It is an activity of change, in which contesting relationships dominance and oppression mark a place and its policies. Further, Hayden calls our attention to the “territorial history” of place, which she delineates as events of struggle that occurred in particular locations. She lists examples of firsts including the “first place in a city where women tried to vote” and “first place new immigrants were allowed to own land” as well as the motel where Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated that now stands as the National Civil Rights Museum.13 Locating these firsts in buildings and landmarks, she states,

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“is one additional way to fuse the social and political meanings of space with the history of the urban landscape” (39). For Hayden, the struggle includes the right to determine the meaning of the event that occurred. It becomes an act of interpreting one’s own history rather than having it interpreted for those working “against spatial injustices.”14 For our Mapping Project, we agree to look for places where “territorial history” connects with literature and cultural work. We explore what it means when authors locate their work in and for a particular place, especially when the position contests dominant narratives. We ask, what can literature do in these situations? How can a literary work and a literary community be a counter to “spatial injustices”? In addition, as a class we agree to explore how the importance of affirming sites of historical struggle merges with a present tense, political struggle. We also frame the project with Wanda Coleman’s poetic prose piece, “L.A. Love Cry” for how it posits its own theory of place.15 The goal is to open up the genre of reading response: we can respond to literature with close reading, critical theory, or poem. Coleman’s piece begins with a question: “Who loves Los Angeles is Los Angeles, the gospel according to Saint Who?” and continues with a litany of contradictions that nonetheless hold the reader in thrall and most importantly, in place. In a second person address, the speaker tells Los Angeles that she loves “your horizons while hating your gutters.” Class comes to the fore as the speaker claims, “Loving your money potential. Loving your fame potential. Hating the way you make a sucker pay and pay for a slice of dream that is never delivered.” The tension between haves and have-nots, between promise and reality, and between access and its denial are all evoked in the lines. Meanwhile, artistic expression is everywhere – in jazz, food, and languages spoken. Present also is the violence of oppression lived by “halfway house refugees and hospice hangers-on.” Toward the end the speaker states, “You hurt me with your poor your alienated your disenfranchised. And Yet I still can’t leave you.” We read Coleman’s piece to introduce the theme of contradiction into our thinking about place. Rather than de facto casting differences as oppositions, “L.A. Love Cry” asks us to think about antagonisms in their more productive sense for how they shape one another, and often, for our purposes, how they come to shape a piece of writing. The assignment is a site of collaborative learning. As with most feminist pedagogical approaches, process is as equally valuable as the final result (an essay), and we reflect on what we learn alongside how we learn. In the MAT graduate classroom, these activities take on an additional task: we give explicit attention to what we teach as well as how we teach. As a class, we ask: How are the political histories of particular places present in literary texts? How might literary texts and movements be a cultural response to their past and/or present politics of place? We ask how place may be the condition of possibility for site-specific literary work: It rises out of social-political issues; springs from community workshops and performance spaces; and often explicitly emphasizes relationships to collective pasts and futures. The instructions are straightforward. Using the Google Maps platform we create a class map.16 First, we decide on layers for the map. For example, we begin with

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layers dedicated to social, economic, ecological, cultural and political.17 As students continue to pin entries to the map throughout the quarter, the need may arise to add additional layers. For example, we include poetry as a separate layer to accommodate student written works. Second, students choose a color pin, which will be their identifying signature on the map. These pins correspond to a sidebar menu that titles the entries in an alphabetical order. The map quickly becomes colorful with pins that locate and expand understanding about a place. Each week students post two pin entries in connection to the assigned texts and their locations. Students are assigned to post specific categories of entries on the map. I ask students to include a certain number of close readings, annotations, researched facts, and genre analysis. As well, I ask students to explore their creativity in how they respond to the literature. Students have posted images, poems, memes, and videos.

Taking account of our place Before turning to the assigned literature, we map our shared location: the classroom. To describe our place is to activate a history and present alive in the buildings, city blocks, citizens and students. Located in Koreatown, The Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program is housed in the Immanuel Presbyterian Church. Founded in Downtown Los Angeles in1888 and moved to Koreatown in 1929, the Church stands grand in gothic style on a corner, flying an LGBTQ rainbow flag alongside the U.S. flag, welcoming a diverse congregation of Latino, Korean, Filipino and Ethiopian community members.18 The Church, labyrinthine in design, is also home to youth programs, an elementary school, health and arts events, and activist meetings. Its commitments as an inclusive space are evident in the people who find a place – temporary or long term – to meet, to gather, to learn. And like other such places in Los Angeles undergoing multiple waves of gentrification, development and ongoing resistance to both, the Church’s steadfastness exists alongside by a palpable economic precarity. On an adjoining block is the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex, where many of my students complete their student teaching with assigned mentor teachers. Before it was a complex of public schools, the site was The Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed in 1968. Two memorial murals by artist Judy Baca covering the media center walls depict the further layered history of the site with representations of the Tongva people on their land, to the United Farm Workers protests, to RFK and his commitments to greater social equality. In 2014, students from the Community Schools joined other Los Angeles Unified School District Students in the successful call for a high school Ethnic Studies requirement.19 In 2017, students walked out in protest of the election.20 Across the street is United Teachers Los Angeles, the union for Los Angeles educations and professionals. The organization advocates for labor rights and educational justice on the local and national level. In 2017, one struggle is to support school board candidates who oppose the mass privatization and charter school movement favored by well-funded interests. And all of us are located in a federally

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designated Promise Zone, an initiative under President Obama to fund economic and education programs in the most underserved areas. The Los Angeles Zone is five neighborhoods including Koreatown, together which constitute the densest population of the entire city, with 35% of its residents living in poverty and 25% of households relying on an income of less than $15,000 a year.21 These areas are home to the city’s largest Central American population, as well as other diverse immigrants and refugees. Another way to state the Promise Zone statistics: This is our location and these are the schools where my students teach.

Mapping the Watts Writers Workshop For our study of the Watts Writers Workshop and its relationship to the Anansi Writers Workshop, we begin with a research question about the Watts Uprising, its causes, the event itself, and its aftereffects. We read Budd Schulberg’s introduction to his edited volume, From the Ashes: Voices of Watts, where he discusses his reason for driving from Beverly Hills to Watts, Los Angeles to begin a writing workshop for community members following the 1965 Watts Uprising.22 He speaks to the challenges and the achievements from the workshop’s hesitant beginnings to the national attention it received in the media as in the U.S. Congress, where writers testified to the substandard social infrastructure and resources in African American neighborhoods. In the account, Schulberg details how the Workshop offered a space to “communicate through the word, through words put together meaningfully to communicate frustrations, feelings, thoughts, ideas.”23 Explicit in the statement is Schulberg’s hope to better the community spirit and social conditions that he understood led to the Watts Revolt. Perhaps more implicit is Schulberg’s faith that the word will eliminate the call for more confrontational resistance to racist policy and policing. We explore the tensions voiced in Schulberg’s introduction with a reading of Daniel Widener’s chapter, “Writing Watts: The Rise and Fall of Cultural Liberalism.”24 He discusses the successes of the Workshop and the disagreements that ultimately led to its end. A primary conflict brought place and politics together as writers and other community members took a revolutionary Black Nationalist position at odds with the more reformist aims of the Workshop. Widener describes the former as “an autonomist, grassroots vision that linked political and aesthetic liberation” in South Los Angeles.25 Widener’s analysis presents a pedagogical question as well. What are the limits of cultural education programing when the mission – brought in from outside of the community – is at odds with members of the community? When does sharing resources and access slide into an agenda that limits the agency of those it is meant to serve? Can we turn to a politics of place to address these questions? Alongside the Schulberg and Widener texts, we read poetry and prose selections in From the Ashes: Voices of Watts. We read Harry Dolan, Johnie Scott, Frannie Carole Brown and Vallejo Ryan Kennedy.26 We ask, how does the literature express an alternative narrative to the media’s representations of the Watts Uprising? How

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might literature and cultural works speak differently to political issues? How does the work register political tensions about the Watts Uprising and internal tensions within the Workshop? In one seminar, students wrote close reading short papers and pinned them to the map. Several students contributed their own poems. One student focused on the connection between segregated neighborhoods, transportation, labor and literature. They analyzed Harry Dolan’s “The Sand-Clock Day,” a short prose piece about the impossibilities of public transportation and finding a job.27 Widener discusses similar issues. He claims South Los Angeles is a place intentionally racially segregated from the rest of Los Angeles. One tactic is the lack of public transportation or extraordinary expense to take a bus outside of Watts. In response to these readings, the student did his own research to see what current day expenses would be to travel from Watts to the Valley, demonstrating the still present economic challenges facing jobseekers. He timed a bus trip, counted the number of transfers and totaled the costs of the travel. He also included Uber costs and a car owner’s starkly different time and money costs. In the response, history is brought into the present moment, mapping a path from one part of Los Angeles to another that belies the story we can often tell ourselves about diversity and ready, speedy access across the city with equal access for all. In another post, a student connected the theme of access and cultural representation to current events. Both Schulberg and Widener address the Watts Writers Workshop and the possibility of greater visibility in Hollywood films and media. The student placed a pin on Watts and wrote about the #Oscarssowhite debate occurring about race, cultural production and awards. The post asks the reader to notice a line from 1965 to today. In addition, we are asked to consider: How much have things changed? In what ways? How do we think about these two seemingly distinct cultural-political sites as participating in the similar call for racial equity in the arts? Our literary mapping project traces the trajectory from the Watts Writers Workshop to the Anansi Writers Workshop hosted in Leimert Park’s The World Stage venue. Kamau Daáood, who began his writing career in the Watts Writers Workshop, founded the latter Workshop in 1990 with Akilah Oliver, Nafis Nahawai and Anthony Lyons.28 In the Workshop, writers gather to listen and compose work, reading to one another and receiving feedback from fellow writers. We read from Shonda Buchanan’s Voices from Leimert Park: A Poetry Anthology, which collects Leimert Park poets into a single collection.29 In her opening “Acknowledgements,” she performs her own history of place. Leimert Park is described as a place of cultural-political resistance in a listing of peoples from “the spirit of the Chumash village” to the individual artists within the community, to “the ones that came before and will come after.”30 As a class, we read a selection of poems from the anthology including Buchanan, Daáood, Mikael Ahadou, Riua Akinshegun, Paul Calderon and Wanda Coleman. For the map, students researched individual poets and their work. Other students placed pins on the map to represent research on the visual artists and musicians

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working from Leimert Park and the surrounding areas. Also pinned were obituaries, books, photographs and recordings of the weekly drum circle that takes place in the park. One student wrote a short story. Others shared their own experiences making art as one in a community of artists. As students continued to pin posts on the map, the map became at once a historical archive and a document of the present. Our classroom discussions continued to build our map. We referenced pinned entries to talk about the importance of cultural sites for community identity. We talked about poetry as a reading method to respond to another poet’s work. Students pinned entries inspired by another student’s comment in class. We pinned and pinned and pinned. In this way the mapping project also documents our conversation, keeping us located with one another, in the assigned texts, and in the actual place-based, material issues connected to literary production.

Reflections Students report an appreciation for locating our readings in particular places.31 The mapping project allows us to collectively create an expansive text analysis that brings it into relation with its generative communities. Our reading-mapping method also helps us to “see” the social and political issues that the works we study often speak back to – in the case of the Watts Writers Workshop these are issues of racial injustice and social-political disenfranchisement. Final student papers translate our mapping practice into a longer analytical work that pairs close readings with the other types of response – research, testimony, poem, image – we use throughout the term.

Notes 1 Henri Lefebvre, “Social Space,” in The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 68–168. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1984), 91–110. 2 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: London: MIT Press, 1995). 3 Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit and Other Plays (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1992), 21–94. Chester Himes, “Zoot Riots Are Race Riots,” in Black California: A Literary Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2011). Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Starting From Loomis and Other Stories (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2013). Barbara Jane Reyes, Poeta in San Francisco (Kaneohe, HI: Tinfish Press, 2005). 4 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches (Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1984). 5 Paulo Freire, “The Importance of the Act of Reading,” Journal of Education 165, no. 1 (1984): 5–11. 6 Ibid., 10. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: London: Routledge, 1994). 9 Ibid., 13. 10 Ibid., 10–11. 11 Hayden, The Power of Place.

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12 13 14 15

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 39. Ibid. Wanda Coleman, “L.A. Love Cry,” in Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1996), 19–22. 16 Instructions: Go to Maps (top right corner) Go to My Maps (from pull down menu on top left) Click on California Literature Click Open in My Maps Choose your layer Drop your pins Post your entry 17 I use thematic layers. However, I imagine other categories (dates, types of events) can work also. 18 “Immanuel Presbyterian Church,” LAConservancy.org., www.laconservancy.org/locations/ immanuel-presbyterian-church. 19 “LAUSD Requiring Ethnic Studies for Graduation,” scpr.org, last modified November 19, 2014, www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2014/11/19/17582/lausd-requiring-ethnicstudies-for-graduation. 20 “Thousands of California Students Stage Walkouts, Chanting ‘Not Our President’,” laist. com, last modified November 9, 2016, http://laist.com/2016/11/09/not_our_president_ student_walk_out.php. 21 “Los Angeles Promise Zone,” ypiusa.org, www.ypiusa.org/lapz. 22 Budd Schulberg, “Introduction” to From the Ashes: Voices of Watts, ed. Schulberg (New York: The New American Library, 1967), 1–24. 23 Ibid., 8. 24 Daniel Widener, “Writing Watts: The Rise and Fall of Cultural Liberalism,” Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2010), 90–114. 25 Ibid., 91. 26 Schulberg, From the Ashes:Voices of Watts. 27 Harry Dolan, “The Sand-Clock Day,” From the Ashes:Voices of Watts, 36–39. 28 “The World Stage,” theworldstage.org, www.theworldstage.org/programs.html#writersworkshop. 29 Shonda Buchanan, ed., Voices From Leimert Park: A Poetry Anthology (Hollywood, CA: Tsehai Publishers and Distributors, 2006). 30 Ibid., 8. 31 I ask four reflection questions: 1

How did the mapping assignment affect how you experienced your reading and writing for the class? 2 How did our mapping assignment affect how you think about literature and place? 3 How might digital mapping work in your own classrooms? 4 Possibilities, limits, any further reflections on literary mapping.

14 SPACE, PLACE, AND GENDER Women and geography in the undergraduate American literature survey Geneva M. Gano

The comparative invisibility of women’s contributions to literary production and relative absence from undergraduate literature syllabi – a perennial concern for those who teach literature from a feminist perspective – has been attributed to a whole battery of explanations, from women’s lack of financial and social support to the discrimination they face in the literary marketplace. Each of these explanations for why women are less likely to publish serious or important literary texts has strong supporting evidence and has been discussed at length. My concern in this essay, however, has a different point of emphasis: I propose that the traditional, doggedly historical approach to teaching literature obscures the literary work that women do and have done, and argue that by explicitly contextualizing women’s work in spatialized systems of literary production as well as in geographically located place, teachers of literature can more effectively bring forward women’s marginalized and undervalued contributions to literary production. My discussion here considers what is perhaps the most frequently taught and historically driven course in the American undergraduate literature curriculum, the survey, in order to propose that by altering its organization to foreground the material conditions of production in place as well as time, we will be able to see, teach, and value a more diverse and differentiated literature.

Recognizing women’s literary work in space and time Undergraduate American literature survey courses and the anthologies that serve them, from the staid Norton to the radical Heath, are typically organized historically rather than geographically. This adherence to a historical timeline, explicitly foregrounded and highlighted in the table of contents, indicates to students and professors that it is time, rather than place, that is significant when considering

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the value of a particular author or work. American literature changes over time, the table of contents implies, and it is the historical narrative of nation-becoming and its ever-accumulating literary stock that is understood to be worth notice and study. Geographic space, on the other hand, is not usually under scrutiny: as scholars including Benedict Anderson and J. Hillis Miller have established, the nation’s spaces and places are typically naturalized as static and given.1 Within the field of American literature, even those texts produced in and for colonies, territories, and borderlands are normally (and silently) assimilated into the national literary canon as manifestly destined, nascent “American” texts. One of the effects of this familiar emphasis on time, not space, in the teaching and learning about American literature, is a flattening of the diversity of American literature: a historical organization prioritizes historical coverage across a national timeline above all other considerations. Most obviously, without careful attention to the spatial systems of American literature, our students’ sense of regional diversity suffers. American literary production has emerged out of a spatially uneven process of nation-building: important institutions associated with literary production such as publishing houses, colleges and universities, salons and bookstores, and libraries were established early and thrived in New York City and New England, forming formidable literary hubs, while all other regional nodes in this system have assumed marginal positions. These regions generally – and frequently imperceptibly – tend to be overrepresented as both settings in and as sites of production for American literary texts. This said, I’m more concerned here with drawing out how the almost exclusive focus on time rather than space magnifies the bias of the American literature survey toward recognizing the achievements and contributions of men. The historically organized survey is a firmly established component of the American literary studies and can be attributed to basic methodologies of close reading that have been central to the field of American literature since it began being taught in colleges and universities about a century ago. The practice of close reading emphasizes and celebrates discrete and unique objects of study: the individual author and the published text, both of which can be pinned to the calendar with a particular date in fixed, absolute time.2 Once a date is established and accepted as known, the practice of close reading becomes the primary method of instruction and engagement for many teachers of the American literary survey: one can focus the students’ attention on the formal and topical concerns of a singular text. However, in prioritizing the (published) literary text, we cannot help but fail to account for the many other contributors to the production of literature that a materialist, place-based analysis brings forward. As feminist geographers including Doreen Massey, Linda McDowell, Gillian Rose, and Pamela Moss have shown, women’s work tends to be less visible and less valued in Western societies generally, as well as in particular systems embedded within them.3 The spatial structures of these systems produce and reproduce a masculinist bias; American systems of literary production are no exception. The role of the “serious” author has generally been gendered male, while less valued and visible roles in literary production, including those of magazine and book editors, silent

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collaborators and researchers, secretaries and typists, book reviewers, salonnières, and patrons of the arts, often tend to be occupied by women. This should come as no surprise: these supporting and nurturing roles within this particular system mirror those under-remunerated jobs that women have historically occupied in disproportionate numbers in American society more broadly.4 In other words, the reproductive work within literary systems of production is generally coded as feminine work, and accordingly devalued (when it is acknowledged at all). On the other hand, the production of singular great works that are valued and taught within the typical American literature survey course is a masculinized accomplishment. As should be evident, I am not concerned primarily with the representation of women or women’s issues within texts (although these are interesting topics), but instead with the gendered nature of textual production. An examination of the spatial systems of literary production reveals the gendering of literary work at the structural level, most typically along the familiar lines of the public (masculine) and private (feminine). As I hope to show in the examples from undergraduate courses that follow, when these systems are considered within located place, this work becomes particularly visible. Considering these systems in located place involves concentrating our focus through place to see what kinds of literary work is being done to support the production of text and singular author that we may not have recognized before. We notice who is doing what work. Massey has made this point for the examination of the gendered nature of social systems more generally, arguing that thinking through spatialized and located systems of production requires an accounting for the functions of the divisions of labor that are performed within and through them.5 The recuperative work that reorganizing the undergraduate survey of American literature by place can do, then, involves a reevaluation of the very nature of what we think of as the objects of literary study: rather than just adding more women to the reading list in the attempt to even out the balance of male and female authors or highlighting women’s issues within texts on that list, this reorganization asks students to reconsider what literary work looks like and what it produces. The answers, by the completion of the reorganized course, are likely to be very different than those of the traditional survey. The reorganization that I propose involves a dynamic process of literary “clustering,” which requires students to think geographically as well as historically about literary production. This approach follows from geographer David Harvey’s influential formulation of the relationship between space and time, which stresses the importance of “trac[ing] back all the items used in the production” of a given commodity in order to reveal “a relation of dependence upon a whole world of social labor,” much of which is the typically obscured, reproductive work that has been thought of as women’s work.6 Harvey refers to and seeks a way beyond the Marxian concept of “the fetishism of commodities” that conceals social information and relations: within literary studies, the book and the author are commodities that are produced within and for a consuming public, and which are singled out as discrete, teachable units in the literary survey. A “cluster” approach to literary study restores the work of less visible and valuable contributors to literary production, resisting their absorption into the end commodity, the published text.

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Modern literary studies has focused so intently on this final product, the published text, that the complex processes of literary production have been obscured. In order to correct for this and help students to consider the lives of those who contribute to literary production, it is imperative to develop methodologies for literary study that can help reveal social information and relations. As Harvey has noted, neither historical nor geographical perspectives alone can produce a sufficiently full picture of these complex relationships.7 By reorganizing the survey to loosen up its historical structure and reintroduce geographical place as a significant context for textual production, undergraduate students of American literature can expect to gain a more complete sense of and appreciation for the many kinds of work that go into “American literature.” I propose restructuring the literary survey into dynamic groupings that I think of as literary “clusters.” These units of study are community-based and modeled on network systems: they include authors, editors, correspondents, patrons, and other members of the literary community who contribute to textual production. Clusters such as these work against a tendency, embedded in the discipline of literary study and bedrock to the American literature anthology, to read and teach American literature according to a fairly strict and undifferentiated, universal timeline. By “clustering” texts within their time and space of production, be that booming 1890s Chicago, the Depression-era rural South, or Ground Zero Manhattan after 9/11, teachers of American literature can bring into the classroom frequently marginalized contributions to American literary culture. In the examples below, I will show how these kinds of clusters emphasize the interplay between social and material conditions of textual production that take account of the particular and differential ways in which literature is produced within space and time. That is to say that literature is produced in multiply-overlapping communities and out of intersectional experiences that are informed by gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and so on. This reorganization necessarily involves an interdisciplinary approach to literary study through which students can come to appreciate similarities between systems of literary production and other social systems in which gender, space, and time play a significant role. This pedagogical approach thus supports a Marxist and feminist philosophy of teaching that insists in looking beyond the field’s usual objects of study, published texts, in order to locate their production in historical time and geographical place. As teachers of American literature take on the clusters of literary production in their classrooms, they can help students come to understand and appreciate the complexity of literature, including the many aspects of work that go into its creation, as well as more expansive rationales for its study.

Space-time clusters: restructuring the American literature survey Substantial revisions to the survey necessarily involve responding to reevaluations of the goals and purpose of the American literature curriculum in the college and university setting as they have appeared in recent years as well as to new technologies that change both how and what we teach. Above, I have indicated some of

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the ways in which “clustering” texts within space and time can help to support a feminist and Marxist pedagogy in the literature classroom, but these are not the only revisionary programs that can be aided by a place-based curriculum. For instance, spatial systems are racialized as well as gendered; in literary studies, a more deliberate focus on particular places brings forward the ways in which race and ethnicity inform the kind of literary work that is done in them as well as how these places are constituted by and through race. In making more visible the possibilities and constraints to literary work through place-based study, a more racially and ethnically inclusive approach to the literature survey is made possible. Recent calls for the geographic expansion of the realm of American literature, intended to push against American literary studies’ originary, nationalist aims and goals, also can be supported by a “clustering” approach to the survey. This approach supports the resistance to the field’s basic, nationalist thrust through its emphasis on regional and transnational literary traditions that overlap, but do not necessarily align, with the bounds of the nation. That is, these only partially assimilable clusters help to call into question a national time and place by disrupting the national-historical timeline in favor of a series of alternatives instead. The new tools that can make a “clustering” approach to the undergraduate American literature survey possible are arguably even more crucial in the reorganization of the syllabus, since these tools actually make these alternative times and places of literary production accessible to students and teachers alike. The digitization of magazine and newspaper archives is perhaps the most significant of these tools; as Sean Latham has argued, the scholarly research utilizing these documents has exploded in recent years, shifting our notions of authorship significantly, forcing us to reconsider the “great divide” between popular and “serious” writing, and reminding us just how important the work of a great editor (or editors) can be in shaping literary taste.8 The digitization of other materials that have long been held privately or in difficult-to-access archives has also helped to bring forward the typically hidden contributions to literary production that are made by women, particularly those occupying care and support positions. As the digitization of personal and institutional papers proceeds, these literary labors become more readily apparent: women have served as secretaries and correspondents, literary agents, manuscript editors and typists, hostesses, and muses. That is, they have supported authors – not necessarily only men – to shape their work and bolster their careers. As any scholar who works regularly with archival materials can attest, this work is absolutely essential to authorial success; the digitization of these materials makes this clear to a much broader audience. If instructors of the American literature survey are to take into consideration both the changed goals and purpose of the field as it has been reconsidered in the past generation or so as well as the new materials made available through technological changes, it is clear that a reevaluation of the content and structure of the course becomes necessary: what and how we teach should reflect these shifts. Though the clustering approach to the survey is not the only way to do this, I think it offers an effective approach that can address both of these changes. In the pages that follow,

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I want to conclude by offering a detailed example of what such a “cluster” might look like in the American Literature survey syllabus. To speak broadly, a clustered syllabus involves, first, breaking the typically relentless historical stream of literary events (usually published works) into multiple clusters of focus or place-based hubs. These may center around any geographical site that the instructor believes constitutes a significant place-time of literary production. For instance, a second-half survey (American Literature, 1865-present) could include focuses that range from the regional to the municipal to the particular: sites could include the post-Gold Rush West, Harlem in the 1920s, Beat Era San Francisco, the post-NAFTA U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and the Guantánamo Bay Prison, among infinite other possibilities. Once these focus hubs are established, the work of literary production can be made visible through textual and social inquiry. The documentation of that work in published texts, correspondence, diaries, documentary films or reports, legal files and testimonies, social events such as parties and protests, and other “ephemera” become part of the larger material of consideration and examination. Ideally, each site could occupy students’ attention for two to three weeks in a typical semester, enough for a substantial investigation, but also permitting comparative consideration of how place helps to constitute the particular kinds of literature produced and the kinds of literary work accomplished. An in-depth example of one such cluster could help to clarify here: perhaps the more well-known, the better. Harlem in the 1920s, widely considered a place and time of exceptional African American activity in literature and the arts, is frequently taught in the American Literature survey through the discussion of works by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. If women’s literary work is recognized in a course like this one, it typically is in the form of the published literary text, the privileged unit of study. In this case, a student might also encounter a story or novel by Zora Neale Hurston or Nella Larsen. A clustering approach, however, brings other women into the picture who contributed in different ways to a whole movement, including Jesse Redmon Fauset, literary editor of the most influential African American magazine of its day, The Crisis, and hostess of one of a number of literary salons for black intellectuals that were run by well-connected women; Regina Anderson, another salonnière and assistant librarian and event planner at Harlem Public Library; journalist Alice Dunbar-Nelson; fiction writer and editor and publisher of Challenge and New Challenge, Dorothy West; singer Marian Anderson who corresponded and socialized with many of the other participants; Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white woman who patronized Black artists; and others whose contributions, despite being immensely important, have been minimized or overlooked because the bulk of their work primarily took place behind-the-scenes.9 Attesting to the literary work that these women did in 1920s Harlem include, of course, correspondence and photographs held in traditional brick-and-mortar archives or published in hardcopy in collections such as The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes (2015), which reveals Hughes’s substantial correspondence with women whose labor supported a number of institutions in Harlem. Online resources include the essays, poems, short stories, plays, and letters to the editor published in

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The Crisis, house organ of the NAACP, available in complete runs from 1910–1922 through the Modernist Journals Project; photo images of guests at Harlem salons (for instance, those available online through The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections); and the “Harlem Renaissance Map” by Tony Millionaire, which shows the physical proximity of notable sites and institutions associated with the literary and artistic “renaissance” (available through the Clark Library’s Digital Collections) or the interactive Digital Harlem website, which highlights the “everyday life” of Harlem as gleaned from newspapers, police records, library archives, and other sites.10 Highlighting materials such as these in clusters based on place and time emphasizes the process of literary production rather than solely its end product. It requires students to linger in place to investigate and consider the social, political, and cultural contexts for literary texts. In a single cluster focused on Harlem, 1925, students might be able to do any and all of the following: •

• • •

•

•

read three prizewinning works from Harlem-based Opportunity magazine’s inaugural literary awards of 1925: Langston Hughes’ poem, “The Weary Blues”; Marita Bonner’s short story, “The Hands – A Story”; and Zora Neale Hurston’s play, “Color Struck”; consult photographs of the May 1, 1925 Opportunity literary awards banquet that attracted an extremely diverse crowd of more than 350 attendees; read correspondence between Charles Johnson and Mrs. Henry G. Leach, an Urban League board member who sponsored the 1925 awards; discuss Harlem as a site of significance even though the prizewinning works read were not written there, and – other than Hughes’s poem – not set there; complete a short writing assignment based on individual examination of the 1925 nightlife map on the Digital Harlem website that requires students to connect the setting of the poem and the worlds that the bluesman and the lyric speaker seem to inhabit to the demographic changes in the city in the wake of the Great Migration; and make thematic and stylistic connections to two other works set in Harlem, Claude McKay’s 1917 “Harlem Dancer,” which first appeared in the avant garde and politically radical Greenwich Village-based magazine, The Seven Arts, and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” first published in the Harlem-produced Fire!! (1926).

Students in a class designed around place-time clusters such as this one will have the opportunity to think across disciplinary lines to get a fuller sense of the many social actors whose work makes the conditions for textual production possible. As is likely apparent by the notes I’ve offered for the above texts, “Harlem” is both socially constructed and socially produced in and through literary culture: its meaning expands beyond its real-world referent, but that meaning has real-world results.11 These meanings become apparent to students through a number of methodological

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strategies. Close reading, an important literary-critical tool, is not jettisoned but is instead enhanced by asking students to actively put the carefully considered literary text in conversation with other historically and geographically adjacent items: they will see literary texts as part of a larger, interactive process rather than as an isolated product. Students themselves will have the opportunity to draw connections from the “radiant” literary text to what they sometimes like to call “the real world,” finding ways to make meaning from these mutually informing relationships and coming to conclusions about the different kinds of literary labor that they observe.12 As students encounter cluster sets across the syllabus, they will utilize primary sources that are not limited to traditional literary texts as they practice and perform historical contextualization, sociological data analysis, and other strategies that they have developed in other disciplinary areas of study. This clustered approach investigates literary production in and through place, permitting a more complex discussion of what “Harlem” meant on a number of fronts, and to a number of constituents, even when authorship, specifically, seems to be mostly reserved for the most privileged male elite. The main drawback to a “clustering” approach to the American Literature survey involves its particular, perennial challenge: how to offer sufficient coverage of an immense and diverse nation’s literary output without marching students down an unswerving historical timeline that seems unresponsive to particular places and moments? Undeniably, “clustering” in place and time exacerbates the nagging feeling that many instructors might have that they are leaving some very important texts off of the syllabus. Additionally, as is probably clear from the above example, teaching the survey through place-based clusters need not necessarily foreground women or the gendered nature of literary production: clusters may be created that persist in occluding women’s literary labor because at the end of the day, the selection of materials can skew the picture of place that is presented. The benefits of approaching the survey in clusters, though, are significant. Clustering encourages an interdisciplinary consideration of the historical, sociological, economic, and aesthetic contexts for the literary texts produced in and through space and place and gives students enrolled in the survey – typically a mix of literature majors and non-majors – a sense of the living relationship between literature and other aspects of life. Ultimately, demonstrating this broad aim is one of the most significant goals of the undergraduate literature survey, and serves as a reminder of why the humanities are essential for holistic and liberal education.

Notes 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (Verso, 2016); J. Hillis Miller, “Literary Study Among the Ruins,” Diacritics 31, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 57–66. 2 The concept of absolute time – and absolute space – is a misleading one, dependent on Cartesian and Newtonian systems that precede modern notions of relative space and time. These latter are the major concern of those interested in human geography, and are explained carefully by David Harvey in “Space as a Key Word, ” David Harvey: A Critical Reader, eds. Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 270–293.

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3 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994). See also Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis, MN: Polity Press, 1999); Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Pamela Moss, Feminisms and Geography: Rethinking Space, Place, and Knowledges (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 4 Mignon Duffy, Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 129–146. 5 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 5. 6 David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 3 (September 1990): 418–434, 422. 7 But Harvey also notes that a singular attention to geographical space, without a consideration of time, also skews our understanding of systems of production. 8 Sean Latham, “The Mess and Muddle of Modernism: The Modernist Journals Project and Modern Periodical Studies,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 407–428. 9 For more resources on women’s many roles in the Harlem Renaissance, see Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (New York, NY: Harper, 2013); Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, eds., Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing 1900–1950 (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995). 10 Tony Millionaire, “The Harlem Renaissance: 100 Years of History, Art, and Culture,” Map (Brooklyn, NY: Ephemera Press, 2001). Print. 11 Discussion of the social construction and production of particular cultures can be found in Setha M. Low, The Ethnography of Place and Space (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). 12 The term “radiant” text comes from Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (New York, NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2001).

15 “BUT WITHER AM I WANDERING?” Gender, class, and writing space in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Kathryn Walchester

Using as its main focus Mary Wollstonecraft’s account of her three-month journey to Scandinavia in the summer of 1795, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, with her 12-month-old baby and French maid, Marguerite, this essay explores the ways in which key aspects of the identity of the traveler-writer impact on conceptualizing and writing about space.1 The essay arises from the pedagogical base of a final-year undergraduate option, “Genres of Travel”; a module which considers representations of space and mobility in a range of texts from seventeenth-century adventurers’ accounts to contemporary travelogues. The teaching session, which forms the basis of this essay focuses on gender and travel writing, and addresses how the concepts of space and identity are read and understood in relation to Wollstonecraft’s pioneering work. Women’s travel writing has been the subject of considerable academic focus for almost thirty years. Travel has been a resonant area for feminist scholars because of its association, according to patriarchal conventions, with female transgression. Since the depiction of journeys in Greek myths, men such as Odysseus were travelers and adventurers, while their wives and mothers, like faithful Penelope, remained at home, as a notable text about women’s travel indicates.2 Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark speaks to such a history of female boundary breaking; indeed it is often cited and studied as an exemplar of proto-feminism.3 Wollstonecraft herself is aware of her challenge to convention in accepting Gilbert Imlay’s request for her to travel to Scandinavia and negotiate with his business partner in Gothenburg, Elias Backman, for the return of the profits of a lost ship, which had contained silver and Bourbon plate. On her arrival in a small coastal town in Norway, she writes, “At supper my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him men’s questions” [emphasis in the original] (Letter I, p. 13). Later in Tønsberg, she notes the reactions of the local people to her as a lone woman traveler, “A woman coming alone, interested them. And I

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know not whether my weariness gave me a look of particular delicacy; but they approached to assist me, and enquire after my wants, as if they were afraid to hurt, and wished to protect me” (Letter VI, p. 65). In response to the protectiveness of the native population Wollstonecraft feels vulnerable and is reminded of her daughter who she has left with her maid in Gothenburg. Wollstonecraft’s melancholy train of thought is arrested by her exclamation, “But whither am I wandering?” and she returns to mull over the practicalities of her journey to Tønsberg the following day. Her self-directed question indicates the way in which for Wollstonecraft and for many female travelers, both mental movement and actual mobility requires tremendous control and direction in response to external influences, challenges and experiences. Wollstonecraft’s text has also been a subject of academic attention since the 1990s because of its representation of aesthetics and its pivotal place in a Romantic tradition of subjective and emotional literary responses to landscapes. Some early scholarly discussions about the sublime by feminist scholars including Anne Mellor and Debra Hartley were essentialist in outlook and came generally from a psychoanalytic approach, which identified differences between writing by men and women writers as rooted in biological gender difference.4 According to this perspective, the sublime landscape is seen as “Other,” which the “Self ” of the male traveler-writer confronts in order to achieve control and transcendence. In contrast, a “feminine sublime,” of the type proposed by Mellor, would position the female viewer as either subsumed by the view, or she might “domesticate” it; that is, she might write about how a particular space reminds her of, and draws her into contact, with loved ones. An example by way of such a representation of a landscape in terms of the “feminine sublime” from Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is the section where Wollstonecraft writes of engaging with the landscape around Tønsberg and her memories of her “dear friend,” Fanny Blood, and Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s daughter, left with Marguerite in Gothenburg. Full of emotion, she writes, I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten, – nor looks I have felt in every nerve which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath. Fate has separated me from another, the fire of whose eyes, tempered by infantine tenderness, still warms my breast; even when gazing on these tremendous cliffs, sublime emotions absorb my soul. (Letter VI, p. 72) Wollstonecraft describes the assimilation of her soul into the landscape, a standard response to the sublime scene, which would usually be followed by a moment of transcendence and metaphysical insight. However, here Wollstonecraft remains a part of the natural scene whilst she is simultaneously brought into communion with two of her closest female companions.

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Other feminist critics during this formative period in the analysis of women’s travel writing drew on Foucauldian theories of discourse analysis. Elizabeth A. Bohls’s discussion of Wollstonecraft’s writing, alongside that of other women travel writers of the Romantic period, highlighted women’s manipulation of, and challenge to, the established masculine discourse of aesthetics. Considering Wollstonecraft’s writing about both sublime and picturesque settings, Bohls notes that Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, “manipulates the emotional register of the sublime from gentle melancholy to daring transcendence as she pioneers the creation of a female Romantic persona.”5 Other points of challenge to the established masculine aesthetic discourse of the period identified by Bohls are the way in which Wollstonecraft, “humanizes the contemplation of nature by grounding it in the concern for the needs of the people who live on and from the land at the same time as she experimentally poses a feminine, non-distanced version of the aesthetic subject.”6 A striking example of Wollstonecraft’s counter to aesthetic conventions is in Letter V, where she describes the forest and wild hillsides in the north of Sweden. Using the standard discourse of the picturesque, as popularized by William Gilpin, she describes how, The rocks which tossed their fantastic heads so high were often covered with pines and firs, varied in the most picturesque manner. Little woods filled up the recesses, when forests did not darken the scene; and vallies [sic] and glens, cleared of trees, displayed a dazzling verdure which contrasted with the gloom of the shading pines. (Letter V, p. 50)7 This is, as James Buzard describes, “wickedly undercut by homing in on the unaesthetic material details of the life going on about her”; as she adds pointedly, “Indeed most of the houses we saw on the road indicated poverty, or rather that the people could just live” (Letter 5, p. 50).8 Social factors, as well as biological difference, also influence the content and style of men and women’s writing; constraints or expectations governing aspects such as the circumstances of their travel and the production and reception of their texts give women’s travel writing particular tendencies. In her chapter, “Travel Writing and Gender” in the Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, Dùnlaith Bird notes how research into restrictive spaces such as that on harems by Inderpal Grewel has shown that, “By virtue of gender women travelers often had access to spaces where their male counterparts were forbidden, giving them a unique attraction for the reading public.”9 Certainly, in Wollstonecraft’s text there is considerable evidence of her access to domestic spaces, largely the province of other women, to which male travelers may have been denied access.10 The constraints on women as writers, producing and attempting to publish their work and to enter the public sphere are also evident in Wollstonecraft’s apology for being “the little hero of each tale,” evident in the “Advertisement” which precedes the text, in which she notes, “A person has a right, I have sometimes thought, when amused by a witty or interesting egotist, to talk of himself when he can

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win our attention by acquiring our affection” (iv). As Carl Thompson points out women writers in particular often preceded their travelogues with such apologies and mitigations to counter, wherever possible, charges of breaching boundaries of propriety.11 Wollstonecraft, however, was unable to defend her reputation; her writing and her unconventional attitude to the female role and to marriage resulted in her being labelled by Tory writer of Gothic Romance, Horace Walpole, as a “hyena in petticoats.”12 Scholars from a materialist-feminist perspective, drawing on the work of feminist geography in the early 2000s, challenged biologically-based essentialist notions underlying binary models of gendered representations of landscapes, asserting that women’s writing tended to be different from that by male writers because of their different social experiences. In her essay addressing “the interrelation between gender, aesthetics, and spatial relations” considering the representation of sublime landscapes in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Sara Mills proposes that “women and men negotiate their positions in space through their respective social positions,” arguing that “spatial relations [. . .] are social relations.”13 Drawing on the work by Mary Crawford on gender differences in language and communication, and anticipating the emphasis on the performativity of gender roles identified by Mary Louise Pratt in her 2004 essay, “Planetarity,” Mills asserts, “I will be arguing that gender should be viewed not in essentialist terms, but rather, [. . .] as an activity or process which we perform.”14 Mills turns to the work of feminist geographer Gillian Rose, who has noted that in writing about landscape, women tend to represent space in relational terms, rather than attempting to dominate it. Thus in her analysis of the section of Letter VI discussed above as Wollstonecraft describes her first impressions of Tønsberg, Mills notes the “negotiation” between the writer and the landscape, rather than this being a specifically feminized or “domesticated” version of the sublime space. She writes, “Thus, rather than the self here being presented as controlling and encompassing a landscape, there is more a sense of negotiation. The agency here is located in nature rather than the subject herself acting.”15 This account of the aesthetics of a space is interpersonal and it is significant that the travelling subject is not always the controlling element. In her discussion of Wollstonecraft’s depiction of the cataract near to Frederikstadt from Letter XV, Mills contests Raoul Granqvist’s reading of Wollstonecraft’s positioning of herself at the center of the landscape and instead asserts that, “I would argue that there is a more complex moving between this centring and dispersal at work here.”16 Such complexities lead Mills to conclude, that “there is no simple divide between male and female subjects when they are describing the sublime.”17 Prompted by an increased focus of post-colonialism, a cluster of texts emerged during the 1990s addressing women’s representation of space in areas away from the conventional sites of the Romantic sublime, that is the mountainous areas of Europe.18 The analysis of women’s travel writing in colonial contexts illuminated the connections with, but also dislocations from, an imperialistic, dominating, and largely patriarchal discourse. In response, feminist writers addressing travel writing

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by women from earlier periods and non-colonial contexts have identified that their representation of travel must be subject to new accounts and space-specific discussions. Zoë Kinsley, analyzing women’s “home tour” accounts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for example, notes the influence of the space into which the female traveler moves and its impact on her recording of it. She writes, “[Women’s] excursions, and their narratives, are also influenced by other factors: their class, their reason for travelling, their travelling companions, the home environment that they are travelling away from and the cultural and geographical location that they journey into.”19 Likewise, in her account of women’s writing about Scotland between 1770 and 1830, Betty Hagglund foregrounds the significance of geographical situation, and adds a note of caution regarding the generalization of theories relating to women’s travel, noting that, “It is not always appropriate to transpose theories and assumptions developed in the study of one geographical area or historical time span to a completely different situation.”20 Whilst conceding the presence of contrasts in travel writing by men and women, Hagglund’s approach highlights the importance of appreciating the specificity of the identity of the traveler and the time period in which she travels and produces her text. She asserts that “both men’s and women’s discourses are constructed by a wide variety of factors including gender, class, race, nationality and historical time period” and notes that “different aspects of an individual’s many-layered multiple-shifting social identities may predominate at various times within a narrative.21 Wollstonecraft, a middle-class British woman travelling to Scandinavia at the end of the eighteenth century, was, as previously noted, a highly unusual figure; mass tourism to this region did not occur until the middle of the following century.22 In her reading of the region, she draws on and often contests previous versions of the place by male precursor travelers including William Coxe.23 As a result, her account re-writes and produces an account which is both geographically and temporally situated. In this period, Scandinavia was not noted as a suitable site for women’s travel. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century, after regular steamship connections and tourist infrastructure was established could writers, such as the Reverend Thomas B. Willson feel confident enough to recommend travel to Norway to young ladies.24 Norway, in particular, with its sublime and dangerous coastline and mountainous scenery was encoded as “masculine territory” amongst British writers and travelers during the late eighteenth-century. As Mona Narain and Karen Gerwitz have suggested in the opening to their recent book, Gender and Space in British Literature 1660–1820, “space itself is conceptualized in gendered terms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not just lived and represented through gendered demarcations.”25 Of the range of specificities identified by Hagglund, Kinsley and others, I would like to draw attention in this case to class. Social class has been an area of travel writing studies, unlike race and gender, which has received scant attention, since James Clifford’s discussion in his chapter, “Travelling Cultures” from 1997.26 Class, alongside gender, is an interesting lens through which to contemplate Wollstonecraft’s rendering of her encounter with Scandinavia because of the fact that she makes overt reference to class and

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details some of the reactions of her French maid Marguerite. The travels of a workingclass woman were seldom noted during this period. The account of the arrival of the two women and the baby on the coast of Norway in the first letter of the text is an illustrative example. Wollstonecraft describes how, “The day was fine; and I enjoyed the water till, approaching the little island, poor Marguerite, whose timidity always acts as a feeler before her adventuring spirit, began to wonder at our not seeing any inhabitants. I did not listen to her.” (Letter I, page 3). Clearly Marguerite is afraid to leave the relative safety of the ship and to land in a remote coastal hamlet. In her reading of the landscape, there is little to support the safety of the party, which includes a 12-month-old baby. Wollstonecraft diminishes Marguerite’s understanding of the place, putting it erroneously down to her characteristic “timidity” and notes that she disregarded the maid’s opinion and fears. In preferencing her own reading of the place, Wollstonecraft foregrounds herself as the “expert” traveler. This is a familiar rhetorical strategy in travel writing of this period; the views or reactions of servants, where they are mentioned – and this is extremely rarely – are used in order to bolster the actions or opinions of their travelling employer. During the two hours it takes them to reach the shore by rowing-boat tender, Wollstonecraft has time to dwell on the hazards which may meet them on their arrival. She is momentarily distracted by “the most picturesque bay I ever saw” before looking again at their destination. She describes how There was a solemn silence in this scene, which made itself be felt. The sunbeams played on the ocean, scarcely ruffled by the lightest breeze, contrasted with the huge, dark rocks, that looked like the dark materials of creation forming the barrier of unwrought space, forcibly struck me; but I should not have been sorry if the cottage had not appeared equally tranquil. (Letter I, p. 5) The account of the shore line reveals the complexities and contradictions in Wollstonecraft’s understanding of the place. Whilst the bay is “picturesque,” her account of the immense rocks signals the sublime, inspiring a feeling of existential terror at some “unwrought space.” This emptiness is echoed in the other part of Wollstonecraft’s sentence; beyond the semi-colon, in a series of convoluted negatives, she admits her fear of the empty cottage. Wollstonecraft’s engagement with aesthetic discourse set out by Edmund Burke has been noted by scholars, including Barbara Taylor, who writes, “‘such notions were so popular in the late eighteenth century that it was hard for any aspirant writer or critic to think outside them. Certainly the young Wollstonecraft couldn’t [. . .].”27 Recovering herself somewhat, Wollstonecraft later attributes some of her maid’s fears to her gender. On their arrival at the house belonging to a lieutenant in charge of the pilot boats, who spoke a little English, she describes how Marguerite’s respect for me could hardly keep her from expressing the fear, strongly marked in her countenance, which my putting ourselves in the power of a strange man excited. He pointed out his cottage; and drawing near to it,

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I was not sorry to see a female figure, though I had not, like Marguerite, been thinking of robberies, murders, or the other evil, which instantly, as the sailors would have said, runs foul of a woman’s imagination. (Letter One, p. 7) Marguerite, it seems, is fearful of rape according to Wollstonecraft, although we do not hear Marguerite herself admit this. Wollstonecraft sets herself apart from her maid and allies herself with the sailors by putting Marguerite’s fears down to her female imagination. There is however, a shred of uncertainty in Wollstonecraft’s appraisal of the scene, as she admits, albeit again through negative inversion, that she was relieved to see a woman in the lieutenant’s home. Thus in her description of her first encounter with the rocky coast of Sweden, we can read the influences of both class and gender. Wollstonecraft positions her own account of the scene in opposition to that of her maid, confirming her narrative authority and her superiority as a traveler, in spite of the fact that her reading of the place and its dangers are closely aligned to those indicated by Marguerite. Wollstonecraft’s conflicted state, both appreciative of the sublimity of the remarkable scenery and yet fearful of its emptiness, comes from her background, having engaged with eighteenth-century ideas about landscape aesthetics and also her practical appreciation of the dangers which lone women travelers might encounter. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is a rich source for considering the representation of, and intersections between, gender and space. The variety of scholarly material pertaining to Wollstonecraft’s text allows a pedagogical approach which can move from presenting early discussions of gender and space, which frequently adopted a binary perspective and understood space in terms of essentially masculine or feminine qualities, to consider more recent critical work and its more nuanced approach, considering both terms as figurative and lived constructions, triangulating gender and space with their representation in literature, and their geographical location. By considering specifically the responses of Marguerite to the journey, and Wollstonecraft’s own enterprise recovering a large sum of shipping money belonging to her lover, Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s travel writing raises additional questions about the role of the working traveler and how perceptions of space are altered when journeys are not prompted by leisure. Such an approach provides an overview of theoretical and critical approaches to reading and writing about gender and space, in addition to broaching debates about how class and occupational status also affect responses to unfamiliar geographical spaces.

Notes 1 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (London: J. Johnson, 1796). References will be hereafter added in the text. 2 Karen Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 3 Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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4 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London; New York: Routledge, 1993); Debra A. Hartley, The Embrace of Nature: Representations of Self and Other by Women Travel Writers of the Romantic Period (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1992); Anne Scott Sorensen, “A Picturesque Travelogue: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 1796,” NORA no. 1 (1996): 31–43; Nancy Yousef, “Wollstonecraft, Rousseau and the Revision of the Romantic Subjectivity,” Studies in Romanticism 38, no. 4 (1999): 537–558; Angela D. Jones, “‘When a Woman so far Outsteps Where Proper Sphere’: Counter-Romantic Tourism,” in Women’s Life-Writing: Finding Voice, Building Community, ed. Linda S. Coleman (New York: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 209–239. See also Patricia Yaeger, “Towards a Female Sublime,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 5 Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716–1818 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14. 6 Ibid., 15. 7 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye: And Several Parts of South Wales etc, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London: R. Blamire, 1789). 8 James Buzard, “The Grand Tour and After,” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37–52, 46. 9 Dùnlaith Bird, “Travel Writing and Gender,” in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Carl Thompson (London: Routledge, 2015), 35–45, 41 cites Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996). 10 See, for example Letter I, p. 7; Letter VI, Letter VIII, p. 99; Letter XXII, p. 245. 11 Carl Thomspon, Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 2011), 180. 12 Cited in Miriam Brody, “The Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Englightenment Rhetoric,” in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Maria J. Falco (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2010), 105–108, 108. 13 Sara Mills, “Written on the Landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark,” in Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775– 1844, ed. Amanda Gilroy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 1–19, 19. 14 Mills, “Written on the Landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark,” in Romantic Geographies, 19; Mary Crawford, Talking Difference: On Gender and Language (London: Sage, 1995); Mary Louise Pratt, “Planetarity,” in Intercultural Dialogue, eds. Mary Louise Pratt, Ron G. Manley, and Susan Bassnett (London: British Council, 2004), 10–32. 15 Mills, “Written on the Landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark,” in Romantic Geographies, 29. 16 Mills, “Written on the Landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark,” in Romantic Geographies, 30; Raoul Granqvist, “Her Imperial Eyes: A Reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark,” Moderna Sprak 91 (1997): 16–24. 17 Mills, “Written on the Landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark,” in Romantic Geographies, 31. 18 For example: Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), Indhira Gose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1998); Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York; London: The Guilford Press, 1994). 19 Zoë Kinsley, Women Writing the Home Tour, 1612–1812 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 8–9. 20 Betty Hagglund, Tourists and Travellers: Women’s Non-Fictional Writing About Scotland, 1770–1830 (Bristol: Channel View, 2010), 10; Hagglund argues that, “The majority of academic studies of women’s travel writings have concentrated on the late Victorian period and have been centred primarily on texts of imperialism and colonialisation.” Hagglund identifies Bohls and Kinsley as “notable exceptions” (footnote 6, p. 12). 21 Hagglund, 11.

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22 See Kathryn Walchester, Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Norway (London: Anthem, 2013), 83–110. 23 William Coxe, Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark (London: S. Price, 1784). 24 Rev. Thomas B. Willson, “Some Norwegian Characteristics,” The Girl’s Own Paper (May 21, 1887): 530–532. 25 Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz, eds., Gender and Space in British Literature 1660–1820 (London: Ashgate, 2014), 3. 26 James Clifford, “Travelling Cultures,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–46. 27 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Picturesque (London: J. Dodsley, 1757); Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 63; see also Anka Ryall and Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström, eds., Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 2003), 84.

PART III

Critical domains

16 SPACE AND PLACE IN FICTIONAL STORYWORLDS Mihai Mindra

In October 2010, a special issue of the PMLA dedicated to Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century indicated narratology as one of the developments in the field which, by reflecting and capitalizing on recent research in the cognitive sciences, would have the potential to “provide convincing explanations for the aesthetic status of the literary work of art,”1 and to continue to flourish as a legitimate approach to the literary in the following ten to fifteen years. The argument was put forward by Monika Fludernik who, while welcoming the return to the textual nature of the literary work and to its role as a human, knowledge-making practice, cautioned against the “utopia engendered by formerly structuralist desires for universality and semiological imperialism” as well as signaled the absence of a “unitary framework for the analysis of the literary texts.”2 Fludernik thus emphasized the need for cognitive narratology to engage with cultural and historical specificity.3 Cognitive narratology, as represented by David Herman, Marie-Laure Ryan, Monika Fludernik, Uri Margolin, Jerome Bruner, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner,4 focuses on the reading and decoding of literary texts perceived as mental narrative and existential experiences of discourse, self, and other. Literary texts would thus consist of one or several “storyworlds,” defined as “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashions in the world to which recipients [i.e. readers] relocate – or make a deictic shift5 – as they work to comprehend the narrative.”6 Space and place are key components of any fictional or non-fictional (‘natural’) storyworld. This paper proposes to explain the concept of narrative spatialization, as defined by David Herman7 and Marie-Laure Ryan,8 to introduce seven principal interpretative tools which may be used in the analysis of space and place in fictional texts in undergraduate, as well as graduate courses on literature, and to illustratively discuss such concepts and tools in relation to Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King (2012).9

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Eggers’s novel deals extensively with imaginatively reconstructed global spaces and their engagement with American neoliberal business ideology. It renders the business exploits of Alan Clay – a 54-year-old self-employed American consultant who undertakes a business trip to Jeddah in the attempt to sell the latest San Francisco-based (Reliant Systems) ICT technology in videoconferencing to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The innovative system of communication is intended to create a virtual interfacing network within which entrepreneurs can relate to one another and negotiate business deals from their home firms. The technology seems best suited for King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) in Jeddah, a place built to act as a global/inter-cultural neoliberal business zone determined by free enterprise and capital transactions. His endeavor will fail, as the deal is craftily stolen by Chinese competitors, and Alan, in an ironic reverse presentation of the relations of economic power between America and the Global South, will remain in Jeddah for the vague promise of a job from a representative of the king’s enterprise. Apart from introducing contemporary spaces and places to the readers, this novel provides ample ideological criticism of neoliberalism10 as a political and economic doctrine which has triggered “the dominance of finance, the political power of the super-rich, and the decline of the middle class.”11 The ideological overtones which permeate the novel make it a good test case for the application of cognitive analysis tools to space and place, while paying equal attention to cultural and historical specificities.

Space and place in cognitive narratology Historical overviews of narratological approaches to space and place provide insight into what constitutes now a complex, multi-disciplinary field of inquiry, which has capitalized on contemporary research into linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, etc. As demonstrated by Herman, early research on narrative used space sparsely as a means of inquiry and mostly to negatively mark off the setting from story,12 orientation from complicating action,13 and description from narration.14 Such polarizations of narrative and description may have originated in “the Aristotelian concept of action, which suggests that description be viewed as secondary, and purely functional, or merely decorative.”15 In such cases description was construed as the “representation of objects, beings, situations, or [. . .] happenings in their spatial rather than temporal existence, their topological rather than chronological functioning [. . .].”16 In opposition to such minimizing theoretical approaches to space, in the late 1960s, A. J. Greimas and his colleagues started their work based on the assumption that spatial reference plays a crucial role in stories. They argued that the relationship reader-text is born out of disengagement of the reader from his/her momentary real time and space to the narrative discourse,17 a narrative convention later defined by cognitive narratologists as deictic shift.18 Subsequently, narratologists such as Catherine Emmott (1997)19 and Monika Fludernik (1996) used a combination of interdisciplinary toolkit resources developed in studies of natural-language

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narratives (e.g. conversational storytelling/oral narratives in response to interviewers), linguistics, cognitive science, ethnography, and sociology, in their analyses of literary narratives. Marie-Laure Ryan provides another thorough overview of narrative spatiality in her 2014 essay on “Space,” organized on three salient aspects: spatial imagery, textualization of space, and thematization of space. Her survey largely coincides with Herman’s; it starts however with Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1957) and focuses on Charlotte Linde and William Labov’s contribution to the definition of two basic narrative spatial strategies, the map and the tour, also known as the survey and the route.20 The map strategy represents the narrative space, ranging from the “perspective of a narrator’s/character’s point of view of pure vertical projection to the panoramic view of an observer situated on an elevated point. The tour strategy [. . .] represents space dynamically from a mobile point of view.”21 Ryan applied and developed this approach by proposing the reader’s construction of “cognitive maps” or “mental models” based on the movements of characters, which would offer the possibility to visualize these movements within the containing storyworld space.22 As indicated by Herman, a focus on the way the mind works with and through stories need not entail a separation between mental representations and the social and material environments that help shape – indeed, partly constitute – the mind itself.23

Cognitive analysis concepts and tools In Story Logic, David Herman suggests that narratives should be approached “as systems of verbal or visual cues prompting their readers to spatialize storyworlds into evolving configurations of participants, objects, and places.”24 In point of spatialization he identifies six cluster concepts that prove useful in the decoding of the significance of story space and place or spatial reference: deictic shift; figure and ground; region, landmarks, and paths; topological and projective locations; motion verbs; and WHAT and WHERE systems. As indicated above, the notion of deictic shift refers to the storyteller’s relocation of the reader from current storyworld areas, or the very space of everyday reality, to alternative ones in the narrative field of the fictional account. The initial deictic center refers to a speaker’s or hearer’s location in space and time, but also to their position in a social hierarchy, and this complex deictic center is the position from which they interpret deictic terms, i.e. the narrator’s and reader’s locations in space and time and their social hierarchy.25 The figure and the ground mark a certain storyworld object/character (figure) in spatial relation to another referential one (ground). Figure-ground relationships are basic to the process of narration as every storyworld is populated by participating characters and/or objects on which narrative attention is focused (figure), while others will act as the background (ground) against which the latter stand out.26 The notions of region, landmarks, and paths, refer to the process whereby places are redistributed spatially as “regions occupied by landmarks or reference objects, and paths as the routes on travels from place to place.” Herman foregrounds the notion

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of paths as of special importance to mental representations of motion among different locations within the narrative field of the storyworld.27 The distinction between topological (or inherent) and projective (or viewer relative) locations is crucial for the understanding of the emergent spaces modeled and communicated by narratives. Thus, topological locations are invariant, whereas projective ones vary with the (implied) author’s/narrator’s angle of vision.28 The fifth spatial reference element is represented by “the deictic functions of motion verbs located on a semantic continuum whose poles, in English, are come and go. By encoding the directionality of movement, motion verbs express projective locations of entities being perceived by narrators, as well as paths taken by entities as they move or are moved from place to place.”29 Finally, the distinction between the WHAT and WHERE systems of spatial cognition refers to that between objects and places. Herman points out the multiplicity of count nouns that name objects and their shapes, in English, as compared to the small number of spatial prepositions used to represent locations.30 The “cognitive mapping” concept, as discussed by Ryan,31 constitutes the seventh cognitive analysis tool considered for the purpose of this paper. It was first introduced by Fredric Jameson, for whom to draw a map of social phenomena necessitated their study as “a world-spanning network of relations.”32 Jameson’s approach to social history opened the way to cultural and globalization studies. Ryan, however, focuses on its cognitive aspects reaching into narrative territory as a mental model meant to acknowledge the spatial relations of the characters interacting within the storyworld. She recommends two strategies to apply for cartographic readings of literary texts: the map strategy, through which space is represented panoramically by a static narrator situated on an elevated point, and the tour strategy, offering the internal perspective of an observer moving inside the surveyed storyworld territory. In the case of the former, the text sketches the map, i.e. provides spatial information, all at once, in order to set the stage of the action, while in the latter, spatial data with relevance for the plot are conveyed progressively, as the narrative unfolds.33 Textual information may be thus translated into mental models that could be rendered visually in graphic maps. Later, Ryan identifies four forms of textual spatiality that readers should be aware of as regular mind perceptions of the literary discourse: “narrative space,” “the spatial extension of the text,” “the space that serves as context and container for the text,” and “the spatial form of the text.” For “narrative space” the primary reference is the physically existing environment in which characters live and move,34 that comprises several specific subcategories: spatial frames referring to the immediate surroundings of the events, shifting scenes of action that may flow into each other (e.g. a “salon” frame that can turn into a “bedroom” frame), hierarchically organized by relations of containment (a room is a subspace of a house); setting, i.e. the general socio-historico-geographical environment in which the action takes place; story space, the space relevant to the plot as mapped by the actions of the characters; narrative/story world, the coherent story space completed by the reader’s imagination on the basis of cultural knowledge and real world experience; narrative universe, the

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master storyworld presented as actual in the literary text, plus all the counterfactual mini-storyworlds constructed by characters as beliefs, wishes, fears, and speculations. Such textualizations of space, as Ryan points out, become narrativizations when space constitutes the setting of an action developing in plot time.35 The “spatial extension of the text” refers to “the spatiality of the text as material object and to the dimensionality of the interface with the reader.”36 As for “the space that serves as context and container for the text,” the major reference consists in the real-world location of the narrated events artistically suggested via its genius loci, the spirit of place.37 The fourth and last form of textual spatiality Ryan tackles in her essay, “the spatial form of the text,” refers to the fiction technique of organizing the textual space by which temporality and causation are diminished in favor of compositional devices, such as plot fragmentation, montage and juxtaposition, and hyperlinks.

Illustration As outlined by Herman and Ryan, the cognitive mapping of any storyworld implies the awareness of the fact that stories are made out of actions performed by agents acting upon each other and upon objects situated within a specific space containing definite, verbally delineated places. Every narrative solicits from readers the observational and imaginative organization of the storyworld space into mental spatial models that may be conceptualized and graphically represented in diagrams of places leading to a “master map.” These constitute key assumptions that have informed my recent class practice with undergraduate students of American Literature. It focused on the investigation of culturally significant spatial models in contemporary neoliberal American fiction, such as Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King. In addition, the class benefited from the application of space and place analysis criteria proposed by David Herman and Marie-Laure Ryan, as detailed above, which had been theoretically introduced prior to the session on Dave Eggers. The first series of exercises consisted in the translation of textual information into mental models of space as visual representations,38 ideologically contextualized in individual (per student) diagrams. Team work distributed in groups in the whole class aimed at reaching some theoretically negotiated agreement on a master map of the novel discussed. In the case of David Eggers’s novel, as with any other literary text that reconstructs real spaces and places, students were requested to consider the concept of deictic shift in effecting the movement from the real, historical KAEC to the literary, textual one, by drawing, comparing and interpreting visual representations of mental spatial models inspired by existing non-fictional, informative sources (photos, guide books, movies) and the novel fragments. The neoliberally determined global economy aspects of the novelistic text are revealed by further deictic shifts: in the pre-storytelling stage of his novelistic existence, Dave Eggers, at his writing desk in the New York of 2011, drafting A Hologram for the King, constitutes the deictic center of this novel; once he starts begetting the text, the center relocates from his room to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

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The storyworld-embedded deictic center is occupied by the protagonist, Alan Clay (figure), living in 2010 in Jeddah, whose story is told in the third person. The text thus solicits from the reader, concomitantly, two major deictic shifts to the two deictic centers of one temporally and spatially transatlantic bipolar storyworld. The cognitive mental model of this particular fictional spatial movement has regularly been represented, in corresponding diagrams, by each class group. Further movement, in the format of paths undertaken by various characters in the novel, in 2010 Jeddah, between various landmarks ensue. In the 2010 narrative present, Jeddah emerges as a region; the protagonist literally relocates among several landmarks: the Hilton hotel room and facilities, KAEC, a Saudi village, different Jeddah official and private locations. The second region, set within the first one and accessed via the protagonist’s memories, is located in the 1990s and 2000s North, and briefly South, America and it includes a number of personal and business landmarks. The reader thus gets imaginatively engaged in spatial to and fro movements from present Saudi Arabia locations to past North and South American ones, travelling among mini-storyworlds’ deictic centers, via multiple deictic shifts stirred by the ethical constraints of Alan’s conscience and consequent reminiscences. Graphic representations of locations and itineraries as presented by working groups usually differ initially and a discussion of objects/characters’ space situatedness and shifting will lead to a master map of the spatial representation of this stage of the plot. Once preliminary maps are drawn, students are asked to indicate any spatial marks that carry ideological significance. What brings Alan Clay to Jeddah? – A possible global market enterprise, selling the latest American ICT technology in videoconferencing to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and pre-contractual relations (the American company Reliant has to demonstrate the market value of the ICT technology in videoconferencing in front of the King). The path followed by Alan for this purpose is: Boston-Nairobi-Riyadh-Jeddah. The motion verbs ‘encoding the direction of movement’ and expressing the path taken by Alan are “flew” and “drove.”39 The verbal cues prompting the reader to spatialize this storyworld, i.e. to map it cognitively, in point of suggestions of neoliberal globalization, into initial “configurations of participants, objects and places,” are contained in the literary discourse. The first indication of the neoliberal global business nature of the protagonist Alan Clay’s journey is offered by the sentence “A man picked him up at the airport and drove him to the Hilton.”40 It represents evidence of preliminary administrative arrangements made, presumably by the ICT company, in order for Alan to be able to fulfil his economic task. Neoliberal topological/projective locations/landmarks are the Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) airport and the Jeddah Hilton hotel premises, that constitute the ground/reference objects of the figure/located object, including Alan Clay’s hotel room, the specific area of his existential anxiety, causally connected with his late neoliberal global business life. The presumed driver (“a man”) and Alan are participants in an action prefiguring the global business meeting configuration, moving (motion verb “drove”) between specific topological places, from the Jeddah airport to Hilton. The students’ progress with the spatial diagrams, i.e. through the cognitive

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reading process, helped reconstruct and map ideologically connoted, historically and culturally specific narrative spaces. The second piece of discursive substantiation of pre-contractual, pre-transactional human action in the global market, prefiguring the alleged business configuration, where the American entrepreneur and the Saudi customer are the negotiating participants, is constituted by the description of KAEC as the topological location, involving the holographic teleconference system, the IT contract, and the commission that constitute the necessary ‘objects’ virtually situated in the transactional space (KAEC). In this way Eggers constructs the spatial component, within which the plot unfolds, as the neoliberal global WHAT versus WHERE systems: He had to travel an hour north at seven for an eight o’clock arrival at the King Abdullah City. There he and his team would set up a holographic teleconference system and would wait to present it to King Abdullah himself. If Abdullah was impressed, he would award the IT contract for the entire city to Reliant, and Alan’s commission, in the mid-six figures, would fix everything that ailed him.41 If chartered in the novel’s diagram, this section completes the spatial map of the protagonist’s ideologically motivated movements. In this fragment KAEC stands for the plot mental space, as a projective location, imbued with the global business meaning by the narrator/implied author as perceived by protagonist Alan Clay. Students have to spot, in the text, the verbal cues indicating the “orientative framework projected by the viewer,”42 i.e. by Alan Clay, indirect third person narrator. Students’ diagrams usually indicate the protagonist’s role as an actor forced to play on the stage set by the cruel economic rules of global neoliberal efficiency, textually represented by semantic collocations, such as: “set up a holographic teleconference system,” “to present it to King Abdullah,” “he would award the IT contract for the entire city to Reliant,” and “Alan’s commission, in the mid-six figures.” The KAEC of A Hologram is a major makeshift fictional reconstruction of a neoliberal global projective location in the plot of the novel. The implied author presents Alan Clay’s views on the city ironically, in moderately critical terms, and recreates in his literary discourse the city space accordingly: They drove in silence. The landscape was flat and blank. Anything built here, an unrelenting desert, was an act of sheer will imposed on territory unsuited for habitation [. . .] a billboard came into view, advertising the development. A family was arranged outside on a deck, an unconvincing sunset behind them. The man was Saudi, a businessman, a cellphone in one hand, a newspaper in the other. The woman serving breakfast to the husband and two eager children, wore a hijab, a modest blouse and pants. Bellow the photo was written KING ABDULLAH ECONOMIC CITY: ONE MAN’S VISION, ONE NATION’S HOPE. [. . .] They drove on [. . .] banners attached to lampposts, bearing images of what the city would look like once

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finished. One featured a man in a thobe getting off a yacht, briefcase in hand, being greeted by two men in black suits and sunglasses. In another, a man was swinging a golf club at dawn, a caddy next to him – another South Asian presumably. There was an airbrushed rendering of a fabulous new stadium. An aerial rendering of a beachfront lined with resorts. A photo of a woman helping her son use a laptop computer. She was wearing a hijab, but was otherwise dressed in Western clothing [. . .] The entirety of the new city thus far comprised three buildings. There was a pastel-pink condominium, which was more or less finished but seemed empty. There was a two-story welcome center, vaguely Mediterranean in style, surrounded by fountains, most of which were dry. And there was a grass office building of about ten stories, squat and square and black. A sign attached to the façade read 7/24/60 [. . .] Yousef was dismissive – That means they’re open for business every day, every hour, every minute. Which I doubt . . .43 Students generally place the objects, projective landmarks of Alan’s orientative framework, under the heading of spatial relations determined by one critical feature of the neoliberal economy globalization process, consisting of material representations (billboards, buildings) that suggest unsubstantial mimesis of western culture qua life styles and environment inside local, Saudi, Global South landscape (“the unrelenting desert”). Similar mapping of the protagonist’s time and space travels in North America assists with drawing the novel’s “master map.” Past narrative relocations from Saudi Arabia to the United States, returns Alan Clay to memories of his family, home, including wife Ruby, daughter Kit, father Ron, suicidal neighbor Charles Fallon and businesses, such as the Schwinn and Reliant companies. This series of spatial shifts reconstructs relationships that precede the narrative present through direct consciousness transfer to the narrative past without any indirect present introduction (e.g. he thought/remembered etc.). American past relations between Alan and other characters are narratively elucidated in the same redolent-relocating manner, from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to reminiscing mental spaces of the protagonist inside the United States and South America (e.g. places along a trip from Boston to Oregon, a police station in Newton, a boat trip on the Rio Negro, Cape Cod beach, Cape Canaveral, a New Hampshire farm, World War II Mühlberg prisoner-of-war camp, etc.). The protagonist’s adversarial relationship with his father, Ron, for instance, is reconstituted in specific environmental situations: a) Ron playing the farmer at the New Hampshire farm he bought after retiring, related critically, as former union man at a large shoe company (Stride Rite, Roxbury) that moved production to China and Thailand (1997, after Ron’s retirement); b) Alan’s physically undefined mental space while engaged in unsuccessful attempts to find financing for a non-global, national business plan to build bicycles in Massachusetts, looking for tardy redemption and support from Ron in the process; c) Alan’s mental relocation from his Jeddah Hilton room, the locus of drunkard excruciating existential crises, to his father’s World War II Mühlberg prisoner-of-war camp storyworld and deictic center.

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The protagonist thus resuscitates memories, reconstituted in detail in terms of regions, landmarks, and paths. The same applies to all the travels he undertakes in the narrative present Jeddah. He travels for business and meets Saudi culture first hand through a series of personal contacts in ethnically and historically specific locations: Yousef in a wrecked, probably 1970s Chevy Caprice car; Yousef ’s father in his own Saudi provincial shoe shop; Yousef ’s brother on the way to the native village; surgeon and occasional lover Dr. Zahra Hakem, in a modern twenty-first century Western style local hospital and her own exotic, Oriental home. As demonstrated above, by mapping the narrative space as well as interrogating the spatialization process and the associated ideological specificities, students can better identify and explain the intricate representation of cultural, historical, sociopolitical reality in Eggers’s artistic discourse. Moreover, on a general note, teaching the stages of literary comprehension in such an active, investigative manner may help the class instructor to facilitate the students’ practical understanding of the intricate connection between world and storyworld.

Notes 1 Monika Fludernik, “Narratology in the Twenty-First Century: The Cognitive Approach to Narrative,” PMLA, Special Topic: Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, coordinated by Cathy Caruth and Jonathan Culler, 125, no. 4 (October 2010): 927. 2 Fludernik, “Narratology,” 927. 3 Various academic accounts of cognitive narratology trace back existing scholarship on mind-relevant aspects of story-telling and the meaning of the reading experience to the 1930s (e.g., Roman Ingarden’s 1931 Literary Work of Art). For a detailed overview of cognitive narratology as a discipline, see David Herman, “Cognitive Narratology (revised version; uploaded 22 September 2013),” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University), accessed April 10, 2017, www. lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/cognitive-narratology-revised-version-. The concern with cultural and historical specificities is illustrated by the work of Lisa Zunshine – “What Is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 1–34 – and Ellen Spolsky, Contracts of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 4 A selection of their scholarship includes: David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996); Uri Margolin, “Telling in the Plural: From Grammar to Ideology,” Poetics Today 21 (2001): 591–618; Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Gilles Fauconnier, Mapping in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 5 David Zubin and Lynne E. Hewitt, “The Deictic Center: A Theory of Deixis in Narrative,” in Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective, eds. Judith F. Duchan, Gail A Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), 129–155. 6 Herman, Story Logic, 5. 7 Ibid., Chapter VII. 8 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003), 214–242; Marie-Laure Ryan, “Space,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University), accessed April 1, 2017, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/space.

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9 Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (New York: Vintage, 2013). 10 Neoliberalism is defined as an ideological byproduct of globalization; the concept partially overlaps with Jameson’s understanding of the multinational/late stage of capitalism or postmodernity. Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 153; Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 54. 11 Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Plutocratic Imagination,” Dissent 60, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 93–97. Eggers is one of the representatives of the ‘neoliberal novel,’ a recent sub-genre encompassing works by Jennifer Egan, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Franzen, Allegra Goodman, Sam Lipsyte, Ralph Nader, among others. 12 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 138–145; Herman, Story Logic, 265. 13 William Labov, “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax,” in Language in the Inner City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 354–359; Herman, Story Logic, 265. 14 Gérard Genette, “Boundaries of Narrative,” New Literary History 8 (1976): 1–13; Philippe Hamon, “What Is a Description?” in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1982), 147–178; Jeffrey Kittay, “Descriptive Limits,” Yale French Studies 61 (1981): 225–243; Herman, Story Logic, 265. 15 Herman, Story Logic, 265. 16 Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 19. For details, cf. Herman, Story Logic, 266–268. 17 Algirdas-Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist, Daniel Patte, James Lee, Edward McMahon II, Gary Phillips, and Michael Rengstorf (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). Herman, Story Logic, 268. 18 Zubin and Hewitt, “The Deictic Center,” 129–155. 19 Catherine Emmot, “Frames of Reference: Contextual Monitoring and the Interpretation of Narrative Discourse,” in Advances in Written Text Analysis, ed. Malcom Coulthard (London: Routledge, 1997), 157–166. 20 Charlotte Linde and William Labov, “Spatial Nerworks as a Site for the Study of Language and Thought,” Language 51, 924–939; Ryan, “Space,” 8. 21 Ryan, “Space,” 8. 22 Ryan, “Cognitive Maps,” 215–240. 23 David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 24 Herman, Story Logic, 1. 25 Ibid., 272. 26 Ibid., 275. 27 Ibid., 278. Concepts developed by Barbara Landau and Ray Jackendoff, “‘What’ and ‘Where’ in Spatial Language and Cognition,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 217–265. 28 Herman, Story Logic, 271, 280. 29 Ibid., 271–281. 30 Ibid., 271–285. For detailed and applicative discussions of specific elements of space and place in cognitive poetics, see Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London; New York: Routledge, 2002); Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen, Cognitive Poetics in Practice (London; New York: Routledge, 2003). 31 Ryan, “Cognitive Maps,” 214–215. 32 Frederic Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. N. Cory and L. Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–360; Ryan, “Cognitive Maps,” 215. 33 Ryan, “Cognitive Maps,” 218–219. 34 Ryan, “Space,” 4.

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ryan, “Space,” 5. Ryan, “Cognitive Maps,” 222. Eggers, A Hologram, 3. Ibid. Eggers, A Hologram, 4. Herman, Story Logic, 264. Eggers, A Hologram, 35–43.

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17 SPACE, MOVEMENT, AND MODERN LITERATURE Scott Cohen

The spatial turn in literary studies has provided new ways to approach modernist texts in the undergraduate classroom.1 Over the past two decades, research surrounding conceptions of space, place, and geography have shaped scholarship across the humanities. Around the same time that spatiality was drawing new attention, modernist studies was seeing the rise of pluralist and postcolonial rejoinders to the fading sense that modernism and modernity were monolithic, Western, metropolitan formations. Seen as a global and diverse set of aesthetic practices, modernism invites lines of inquiry informed by spatial and geographic analyses. Indeed, much of what distinguishes modernism’s experimental style has long been understood in a spatial register; juxtaposition, simultaneity, montage, fragmentation all serve to disrupt previously given unities and relations of time and space.2 David Harvey suggests that aesthetic practices after the mid-nineteenth century offer “signals of a radical break of cultural sentiment that reflected a profound questioning of the meaning of space and place, of present, past and future, in a world of insecurity and rapidly expanding spatial horizons.”3 In its prismatic distortion of reality as well as its complicated relation to modernity, modernism is well suited for investigation through the lenses of space and place in the classroom. Focusing on the particulars of geography in notoriously difficult texts can make conveniently solid that which routinely slips through the reader’s grasp. The diversity of styles we associate with modernism and the proliferation of overlapping definitions can baffle the student seeking concrete terms. Paradoxically, in the undergraduate classroom, space and place, which were radically disrupted by the crosscurrents of modernity, can serve as steady anchors in the study of modernism’s often opaque texts. Examining the poetics and politics of these spaces helps unite the wide range of texts we associate with modernism. Theoretical renderings of space have offered powerful lenses to better observe modernism’s global and local geographies. The landscapes of modernity benefit from careful spatial analysis,

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whether it is through Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of space as a form of poetic experience or Henri Lefebvre’s insistence that space is neither abstract nor uniform but rather produced through social relations and power.4 Teaching space and place in modernism has allowed us to see how literary production was interlaced with modernity, capital, and empire. However, after several years of teaching undergraduate literature courses with space as the central analytical term for approaching modernism, I began to question whether in our work we were inadvertently mistaking modernism’s maps for its territory, whether in our attention to the production of space we were not attending closely enough to the particular forms of movement and modes of mobility that traversed and ultimately constituted these spaces. Three theoretical conceptions of space have served as inspiration for changing how I teach modernism and space: Doreen Massey’s feminist geography of “power geometry,” Michel de Certeau’s spatial practices, and Fredric Jameson’s classic articulation of the dialectic of modernism and imperialism. Reckoning with these compelling conceptions of space and place calls for a new way of charting the spatial dimensions of modern literature, one focused on movement and mobility. For it is in movement that modernism’s confrontation with modernity is best observed. In what follows, I reflect on the transition that occurred in my approach to teaching modernist texts and the advantages to be found in viewing modern texts as thematizations of modernity’s churning spatial configurations. Along with the focus on modernist movement came a realization that these texts were better understood through the lens of modernity. Until recently, perhaps adhering to modernism’s own self-conception too closely, I did not give modernity much attention in the classroom except insofar as it helped illuminate modernism. Yet rather than serving as a background to modernism, it might be more useful to see modernity as a constitutive element and a force for conceptualizing the array of literary practices that fall under the signs of modernism and avant-gardism. A secondary aim of this essay is to suggest that using digital tools and digital pedagogy can help undergraduates see modernism’s vexed treatment of movement and mobility. By blending theoretical, historical, and archival approaches in the form of a course-based research project, we can register movement and mobility throughout modern literature.

Space and place in the maelstrom of modernity When exploring the space and place of modernism in the classroom, there always is a danger of producing a set of locations that, in their rendering, become static. The challenge then becomes studying modernism’s spaces, global and local, without pinning them down in such a way that makes it difficult to see the movement that energizes them. When possible we should retain what Marshall Berman compellingly described as: “the glory of modern energy and dynamism, the ravages of modern disintegration and nihilism, the strange intimacy between them; the sense of being caught in a vortex where all facts and values are whirled, exploded, decomposed, recombined; a basic uncertainty about what is basic, what is valuable,

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even what is real; a flaring up of the most radical hopes in the midst of their radical negotiations.”5 To look at how space operates within what Berman evocatively describes as the “maelstrom of modern life”6 is to look at spaces in movement and to stress that maps and plans in themselves are powerful but simple abstractions obscuring a host of relations. In the “maelstrom” of modernity, space is most prominently experienced and expressed as movement. But our definitions of space do not adequately account for the many dimensions of spatial experience. Thankfully, in her provocative critique of geography, Massey offers an alternative definition of space, contending that space “is created out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities, of the interlocking and the non-interlocking, and the networks of relations at every scale from local to global.”7 Importantly, Massey notes that, since the relations constituting what she calls “space – time” are always in flux, “seeing space as a moment in the intersection of configured social relations (rather than an absolute dimension) means that it cannot be seen as static.”8 Read alongside de Certeau, whose incessant and unpredictable “pedestrian rhetorics” contest the static plans drafted by those producing urban space, the folly of reading spaces as stable becomes clear. As such, maps both reveal and hide. As de Certaeu puts it, The map thus collates on the same plane as heterogeneous places, some received from a tradition and others produced by observation. But the important thing here is the erasure of the itineraries which, presupposing the first category of places and conditioning the second, makes it possible to move from one to the other. The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form a tableau of a ‘state’ of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity, as if in the wings, the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition.9 Maps and plans of modernity struggle to keep up with the stunning number of transportation and communications technologies that were invented, advanced, and popularized during a relatively narrow historical window. The resulting proliferation of forms of movement and the different ways of experiencing that movement can be seen throughout culture. Stephen Kern’s intellectual history of time and space offers an excellent account of how aesthetic practices emerge out of the vexing new modes of spatial and temporal experience in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century.10 Drawing extensively on Kern, Harvey charts the trend and wide-ranging consequences of altering conceptions of time and space under the sign of “time – space compression”: the yoked phenomena of life seeming to speed up while transit across planetary space becomes easier, so much so “that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us.”11 This new and unyielding evolution of spatial and temporal configurations is easily read in modernism’s forms and themes. When teaching modernist literature, Harvey’s “time – space compression” routinely figures as an important element for explaining modernism’s crisis of

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representation, thereby helping us see how aesthetic experimentation emerged out of rapidly changing notions of space and time. The consequences for modernist aesthetics were often contradictory, Harvey is quick to acknowledge: “Modernism, seen as a whole, explored the dialectic of place versus space, of present versus past, in a variety of ways. While celebrating universality and the collapse of spatial barriers, it also explored new meanings for space and place in ways that tacitly reinforced local identity.”12 Harvey’s observation is most often used to point to the vexed political realignments of the twentieth century and ultimately the aesthetic-spatial underpinnings of fascism and reactionary politics. By underscoring modernism’s mixed political affiliations, Harvey is also charting a kind of movement: “unless we are prepared to see even [modernism’s] universal aspirations as the outcome of a perpetual dialogue with localism and nationalism, I think we shall miss some of its more important features.”13 Harvey helps us better see how modernism as well as other overlapping formations, including nation, empire, sovereignty, are all constituted through a constant form of shuttling, a “perpetual dialogue” of psychic movement and bifurcated affiliations between global and local formations. In this shuttling, in the dialectic of local and global, there is incessant movement. Yet when we invoke modernity’s “time-space compression,” it might not always be the case that we are fully reckoning with how forms of movement are manifest in the texts of modernism. The concern is only heightened when we attempt to understand articulations of global space, which arguably underwrite modernity’s spatial configuration with a colonialist narrative of expansion and progress. Edward Said’s insistence that the “internal dynamics of West society and culture” are always subject to “the external pressures on culture from the imperium” serves as an important reminder of this fact.14 But most helpful is Jameson’s suggestion that the period’s sense of global space poses significant challenges to “cognitive mapping,” dooming spatial perception to interminable incompleteness in light of the radical otherness of an unknowable periphery that nevertheless figures in everyday life in Europe. The colonial system ensures that a specific type of loss is registered in metropolitan perceptions of space: “a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside the daily life and existential experience of the home country.”15 Jameson further asserts that artistic content will now henceforth always have something missing about it, but in the sense of a privation that can never be restored or made whole simply by adding back in the missing component: its lack is rather comparable to another dimension, an outside like the other face of a mirror, which it constitutively lacks, and which can never be made up or made good.16 In the face of this loss, not only was modernist expression contorted into the style we now associate with it, but mapping takes on a compensatory function. Such maps, however, only serve to illustrate the illusive nature of a shared, unified spatial experience of modernity, thereby further evincing the representational dilemmas

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modernism found so stylistically generative. “Cartography is not the solution, but rather the problem,” Jameson remarks before stating that the “map, if there is to be one, must somehow emerge from the demands and constraints of the spatial perceptions of the individual.”17 Our challenge, therefore, is to grasp modernism’s struggle with mapping the sprawl of modernity’s dimensions without allowing our representations to stand still. Or, put another way with reference to the theoretical framework sketched above, how do we recover de Certeau’s “itineraries” and discern Massey’s “power geometry” in the “maelstrom” of modernity? How can we examine the “spatial perceptions of the individual” that Jameson encourages us to prioritize? Such spatial experiences profoundly influence social life but are rarely easy to apprehend. As Kern rightly suggests, space is “never conceptualized directly, and it is necessary to interpret many aspects of a culture to grasp its particular notion of extension.”18 Importantly, these are neither inconsequential nor invisible matters. Drawing our attention to the human scale of modernity’s expanse, Robert Tally notes, “the massive movements of populations – exiles, émigrés, refugees, soldiers, administrators, entrepreneurs, and explorers – disclosed a hitherto unthinkable level of mobility in the world, and such movement emphasized geographical difference; that is, one’s place could not simply be taken for granted any longer.”19 These conditions give greater significance to Marshall Berman’s provocative question, “How was the self to move and live in the whirlwind?”20 Teaching modernism in a manner that captures the “whirlwind” and “maelstrom” of modernity requires us to pay special attention to how movement and mobility scored individual and collective spatial experiences. Insofar as modernism documents human experiences of these newly shifting technologies, how do we account for the way conceptions of space are founded on forms of movement, of positioning, of contextualization? How do we discern the mental shuttling – from particular to general, from local to global – created by a sense of psychic moment and reinforced by technological promises of real movement? Is it possible to investigate how global imagining – that is, how one’s location here and one’s conception of the imagined there – propelled modernist texts into being? These overlapping questions encourage us to change our frame of reference to see movement itself as a dominant feature within modernism. These are the questions that have given rise to a new incarnation of my modernism course – one that emphasizes movement over space and modernity over modernism. Thankfully, these are not merely theoretical questions. Indeed, we can see prominent instances of discourse grappling with movement and mobility throughout modernity’s archive. In the undergraduate classroom, I have found that it is important to stage texts and concepts so students can think like modernists, which, as Berman suggests, is to “make oneself somehow at home in this maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.”21

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Pedagogy of the Maelstrom When I recently offered my upper-level undergraduate modernism course, I was eager to design the 14-week seminar around the theoretical and historical frame articulated above. In addition, two questions propelled our study, entitled “Modernism and Movement, 1870–1935.” First, what do we see in modernist texts when we study movement as a form of spatial analysis? Second, what is the most appropriate pedagogy for exploring these thematic features across a sprawling set of discourses that constitute global modernity? In this particular course, we were uniquely outfitted for pursuing these lines of inquiry and discovery. Our class was supported by a teaching librarian who helped students develop their research skills and directed them to resources they would find useful as they pursued their research projects. Stonehill College’s MacPháidín Library and Center for Teaching and Learning’s Faculty-Librarian Partnership Program (FLPP) allowed us to integrate archival research into our study of modernism. From the first day of the course, students were handling, examining, and scanning archival material from the period. Our librarian, Patricia McPherson, served as a fellow guide as we introduced students to a historical background that was unfamiliar to many of them. In the process, Patricia helped students discover the inherent connection between literature and archival materials. Drawing on the vast archive of material published during our decades of interest, roughly 1880–1940, in the form of magazines and newspapers, students were easily able to collect examples of modernity’s popular discourses of “time – space compression.” Students brought their literary training to bear on these contemporaneous discourses. Although we did not have access to the collections of a research library, students were nevertheless able to plunge into a wide range of Anglo-American popular publications, including English Illustrated Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, Macmillan’s Magazine, Pall Mall Magazine, Women’s World, Puck, Travel, The Studio, Popular Science, The Literary Digest, and The Illustrated London News. These were supplemented with specialized digital collections like Duke University’s Ad∗Access, Blue Mountain Project’s collection of avant-garde periodicals (Princeton), The Pulp Magazines Project, Conrad First, The Modernist Magazines Project, the Marconi Collection, the British National Archives Collection, and the British Newspaper Archive. Part scavenger hunt, part discursive immersion, students scoured the available resources for discourses delineating the technologies of modernization. Early on students selected a particular method for moving people, objects, or information. From transportation technologies to emerging communications systems, students effectively tested the case for Harvey’s “time – space compression” with their own investigation. Each student selected a particular technology and presented brief reports in class, sketching its origin, development, and relevant cultural consequences. As students pursued their independent research, we endeavored to connect their individual discovery with our collective investigation and ongoing reading in the course. We developed workflows for scanning, tagging, and sharing found

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materials in a shared digital repository. Within this digital repository, we engaged in collaborative annotation and description of resources. By the end of the semester, we had unearthed a wealth of materials – advertisements, images, maps, pamphlets, timetables, guidebooks, personal narratives, political cartoons, sounds, and films – for collective examination and use in final projects that sought to find how overlapping technologies shaped our concurrent readings in modernism. The result was a genuinely collaborative project-based learning experience where the boundaries of individual research and group analysis were blurred. At the same time, students developed a familiarity with digital tools, research methods, tagging, and metadata. While much of this work was not breaking new scholarly ground, it allowed students to develop a granular perspective of how movement and mobility reconfigured the spaces of modernity. They confirmed that, as Harvey had told us, modernity “entails [. . .] the perpetual disruption of temporal and spatial rhythms.”22 Importantly, they reaffirmed this through personal acts of discovery. While immersed in the specific discourses of the moment, students developed a better appreciation for the contexts out of which the imaginary works emerged. Moreover, we were able to establish a discursive classroom community grounded in shared artifacts and ideas. This allowed students to pursue a range of self-designed research and creative projects, from podcasts to blogs to text-mining projects to thick descriptions, throughout the semester, all of which were added to our collective critical discourse and enriched their final literary-critical essays.

Conclusion As expected, much of the material in our archive of movement and mobility sang modernity’s praises or marveled at modernization’s triumph over time and space. However, the further we read into the modernist syllabus for the course, the stranger these celebratory descriptions of modernity became. Students quickly saw how modernist texts frequently presented movement and mobility as sources of tension, anxiety, shock, and malaise. This stood in stark contrast to popular discourses promoting the ease of travel. Within this theoretical and historical framework, any number of literary texts would have proved illuminating. At the start of the semester, while students plunged into archival materials, we began reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), a particularly illustrative fantasy of global transit. Phileas Fogg’s victory over space and time embodies modernity’s embrace of movement while offering glimpses at difficulties ahead. This narrative of unfettered movement finds a poignant counterpoint in two turn of the century crises of mobility: the radical immobility of concentration camps in the South African Wars (1899–1902) and the collapse of the adventurist traffic in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). The immobility of these groves and plains of death stands in contrast to modernity’s ceaseless movement. E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) illustrates the conflicting impulses of the Wilcoxes’ obsession with speed and expansion and the Schlegels’ attempt to find

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and navigate estuaries in their wake. In The War in the Air (1907), H. G. Wells offers a cautionary and prophetic tale of mechanized warfare and social calamity. It is an even more staggering vision when read alongside Italian Futurism and Vorticism’s dynamism and obsession with movement and speed. Postwar Vita Sackville-West, in Seducers in Ecuador (1924) and her travel writing offers a reformation of adventurist mobility tinged with modernism’s parallactic vision. Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) finds the post-war rhythm of London is punctuated by death from above and below. And we finished with Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934), a distressing tale of imaginative journeys and real despair. Rhys’s novel, in foregrounding the tortured unevenness of movement through modernity at global and local scales, serves as a poignant concluding text. In addition to these diverse literary texts, students were encouraged to develop and position their own research in the context of recent scholarly debates around modernism whenever appropriate. Though too voluminous to be required reading for this particular course, selections included: Enda Duffy on the politics and pleasures of speed; Jed Esty on Forster, empire, and insularity; Rebecca Walkowitz on the currents of cosmopolitanism within modernism; Peter Kalliney on the dialects of urban space and nation in a global context; Jon Hegglund on the rendering of planetary space; Andrew Thacker on movement through the urban space; Jessica Berman on the landscapes conjured by modernist mappings, in Joyce and Woolf in particular; Thomas Richards on the contested flow of information through empire’s networks; Urmila Seshagiri on modernism in Rhys; and my own essay on Virginia Woolf and the empire as seen in movement on the streets of London.23 Our semester-long investigation revealed that modernism rarely stood still in the face of modernity’s maelstrom. The course was successful in having students appreciate that even the most apparently reified representations of space lived in persistent tension with how space was experienced as a dialectic of real and imagined movement. By blending the theoretical, historical, and literary, we were able to discern the territory beneath the map, and it was largely visible in glimpses made possible by motion.

Notes 1 This foray into teaching modernism and movement would not have been possible without the intellectual curiosity and adventurous spirit of the Stonehill students of “ENG 390: Topics in Modernism” during the fall 2015 semester. I am very grateful for the assistance of Patricia McPherson of Stonehill College’s MacPháidín Library. 2 These features are drawn from Eugene Lunn’s classic catalogue of modernism’s “unifying aspects.” Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 34. Similarly, Bradbury and McFarlane’s classic thumbnail sketch of modernism gestures to productive avenues of inquiry into modernity’s disruption, claiming modernism exhibits “a quality of abstraction and highly conscious artifice, taking us behind familiar reality, breaking away from familiar functions of language and conventions of form.” See Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890–1930 (New York: Penguin, 1976), 24. Notably, Joseph Frank’s 1945 essay and subsequent book was among the earliest articulations of modernist form as a manifestation of spatialization. See Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

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3 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 263. 4 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 5 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Penguin, 1982), 121. 6 Ibid., 16. 7 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 265. 8 Ibid., 265. 9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 121. 10 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 11 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 240. 12 Ibid., 273. 13 Ibid., 276. 14 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 188. 15 Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 50–51. 16 Ibid., 51. 17 Ibid., 52. 18 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 138. 19 Robert T. Tally, Jr., Spatiality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 13. 20 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 17. 21 Ibid., 345–346. 22 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 216. 23 Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 1–16; Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 76–85; Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press), 8–20; Peter J. Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 36–50; Jon Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 31–54; Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 46–79; Jessica Berman, “Modernism’s Possible Geographies,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, eds. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 281–296; Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 73–109; Urmila Seshagiri, “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 487–505; Scott Cohen, “The Empire from the Street: Virginia Woolf, Wembley, and Imperial Monuments,” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1 (2004): 85–109.

18 LITERATURE AND THE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH “BORDERLAND” Teaching the culture of identity and place Ruth Oldman

Medieval English literature provides an interesting case for instructors interested in teaching spatial literary studies. Literature from this time period demonstrates cultural, linguistic, and political diversity that creates dynamic conversations about the various contributing factors to the literature. This proves especially fruitful for instructors searching to have discussions about the differences between space and place and what truly defines a national identity and a nation. It is important to identify the ways in which medieval English borderland literature is helpful in the field of spatial literary studies, particularly when understanding the multiple perspectives that contribute to the shaping of national identities and nationhood. How space and place are defined in this literature provides students and instructors alike with many diverse approaches to better understanding what makes a borderland. Examining literature from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in regards to space and place can help students and scholars alike better understand the medieval texts as well as how this literature contributes to the study of borderlands through the ages. It is first important to establish the definition of the term “borderland” within the Middle Ages and how medieval English literature fits into this framework. Often, when individuals think of borderlands, they imagine the regions surrounding delineations between two places. Within borderland studies, scholars tend to examine the cultural exchange that occurs between these places. As Homi Bhabha explains, the transmission of culture between two places tends to create binaries, revealing themselves to be “consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress.”1 While this type of cultural exchange may be common in places with more defined borders and distinguished identities, it is more complex in areas and time periods where borders are not as definite and shift frequently. Shifting borders were particularly prominent around the British Isles during the Middle Ages, due

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in part to power struggles between nations and intermarriage between monarchs. One of the best examples of border fluctuation is that of the Anglo-Scottish border. Established by the Romans with Hadrian’s Wall close to modern day Carlisle, the border fluctuated over the course of several centuries, eventually situating itself from Solway to Berwick along the River Tweed in the early 13th century.2 While border fluctuation certainly contributed to intersecting identities, the cultural exchanges that came as a result of political and colonial events made the British Isles a cultural borderland. There are many examples of this occurring throughout medieval English history, though one of the most apparent is William the Conqueror’s Norman Conquest led to a shift in social and cultural influence from Scandinavia to Latin European.3 David Charles Douglas explains after the 1066 invasion, the vernacular culture in England – which had been flourishing – suddenly “received a lethal blow . . . for more than a century, with rare exceptions, whatever was thought and written by Englishmen was thought and written in Latin, and the English contributions to philosophy and theology were to form part of controversies which were common to the Continent.”4 For a considerable time following the Norman Conquest, England was heavily influenced by continental modes of thought. According to Paul Strohm, literary texts written in England for centuries to follow were written in Continental French and it was not until the mid-14th century that English was considered a literary language.5 While the English language still existed amongst the lower classes, it was not considered culturally superior. This struggle hints to Bhabha’s discussion of binaries in cultural exchange as there was a hierarchy established between continental and Isles, French and English. However, this only accounts for one dimension of cultural identity within the British Isles. Often when students think of the medieval British Isles, they consider a uniform identity that often is understood as English. Within the Isles, though, there were numerous identities, including Northern and Southern English, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish. What complicated the uniformity of these identities were the debates between national and regional identities, particularly in regards to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. For instance, during the Wars of Independence, Scotland fought to sever both national and political ties from the English, fueled by its proud nationalism. However, in the mind of King Edward I of England, Scotland was a regionalized identity within the overarching British national one. In fact, the complicated web of identity construction evident in the later British Middle Ages was a product of domination and political disagreements. Domination affects how groups see themselves in relation to others, arising “out of the natural weft of political relationships. So it often was in medieval Britain. Political exiles and refugees fled from England to Wales, Ireland and Scotland; from Wales to Ireland and England; and no doubt likewise from Scotland to Ireland to wherever was convenient.”6 This population shifting is comparable to the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. The movement of people from different parts of the British Isles resulted in cultural exchange and identity blending. The treatment of these identities both in politics and literature reveals the diversity and dichotomies that existed during the later Middle Ages. Within borderland

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studies, students can better understand these concepts through Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories on “new mestiza” and “mestiza consciousness.” AnaLouise Keating provides a succinct definition of both in her Introduction to The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader: For Anzaldúa, “new mestizas” are people who inhabit multiple worlds because of their gender, sexuality, color, class, body, personality, spiritual beliefs, and/or other life experiences. This theory offers a new concept of personhood that synergistically combines apparently contradictory Euro-American and indigenous traditions. Anzaldúa further develops her theory of the new mestiza into an epistemology and thetics she calls “mestiza consciousness”: holistic, relational modes of thinking and acting or, as she explains . . . “a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.”7 While Anzaldúa’s theories apply to the tensions between the United States and Mexico, the same ideas can be applied to the medieval British Isles. The Middle Ages in Britain were culturally, racially, and politically diverse. Due to domination and conquest, identities intersected, creating a cultural borderland that stretched beyond that of the island’s coasts and region’s lines of delineation. Rather, populations and individuals would have embraced several cultural traditions, forming a type of identity hybrid both personally and socially. Despite multiculturalism and intersecting identities in the case of much of the population, there are also many instances in which the idea of hybridity is shunned and “othering” is embraced. Political conflict and conquest were common in the later Middle Ages, both of which result in an “us versus them” mentality. Although there was a type of intercultural blending that existed, it is important to define this hybridity in terms of medieval thought processes, particularly in regards to borderland identity and ideology. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains it best when discussing the relationship between the Welsh and English: Anzaldúa figures her “new mestiza” as part human, part serpent, as a body that spectacularly displays its constitutive histories of difference, colonialism, and violent struggle without pretending they can be synthesized into some coherent, homogenous, domesticated form . . .Yet Anzaldúa’s hybrids are monsters in the medieval sense, conjoined not through a binaric conjunction but by means of the nontotalizable “and . . . and . . . and . . .” . . . The endlessly conjunctive work of monstrous hybridity produces an unbounded middle space, as unstable corporally as it is geographically and temporally. This middle, this bridge conjoining differences, is the borderlands.8 Although there were many instances of hybridity in the Middle Ages – culturally, ethnically, and socially – these mixtures were seen as monstrous and unnatural. Much of the literature in the Middle Ages dealt with addressing binaries, whether explicitly “othering” or commenting on the complexities of multiculturalism. It is important, then, for students to recognize that utilizing a borderland theoretical

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approach can be risky as analysis of these texts must closely regard the mindsets of the medieval authors and society. How then can we translate this complicated theoretical web for students? How can students better understand national identity in medieval literature if there is not a consensus on how identity was formulated and labeled during the British Middle Ages? It is critical for students and scholars to recognize the various layers of identity in medieval society were often discussed or portrayed through literature. The Middle Ages were a time of cultural intersection and exchange, complicating precise definitions of national or regional identities. Additionally, students must also recognize their biases and presumptions prior to analyzing medieval British texts. As Modern readers we must keep in mind the medieval mentality in order to effectively understand the literature. By embracing these complications within literary analysis rather than engaging in hierarchical comparisons opens up new approaches to criticism on medieval identity, providing students with an ability to contribute their perspectives rather than absorb knowledge.

Classroom application In the first part of this article, I explained the ways in which borderland theory could benefit a student’s study of medieval literature. In this section, several examples will be provided of how to apply this theoretical approach in the classroom. What is critical for student comprehension and appropriate analysis is proper contextual support. Students come into the classroom with preconceived notions about the Middle Ages that can affect how they interpret and comprehend the literature. While it can be a useful exercise to have students express what they already know about the time period and literature, it is pertinent that the information be pruned and examined as students share. This practice is particularly useful when teaching students who have little to no experience with medieval texts. However, regardless if students are undergraduate or graduate, when teaching medieval literature with a borderland theoretical approach it is important to historically, politically, and socially contextualize the text; identify the various personal, political, and cultural identities of both the text and the author; and analyze the text with these main subjects in mind. Additionally, it is critical to analyze how the medieval audience would have received the literature based on their perception of borderland identity and hybridity in addition to our modern understanding of these identities. There are many ways to read medieval literature through borderland theory, as well as several ways the literature itself presents borderland identities. The two approaches that I will be focusing on in this article are literature from physical borderlands; and texts and traditions that grapple with the concepts of identity, thus revealing aspects of borderland identity. Some textual examples will be provided9 for each approach as well as how the texts should be discussed when taking borderland theory into consideration. The first and most fitting literature for borderland theoretical application is literature from borderland regions. Physical borderlands were complex areas of cultural

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exchange and identity construction. Much of the literature from those areas dealt with the topics of “othering” and monstrous hybridity. Strong literary examples of this aspect of borderland identity came from the Welsh-English border region. One specific example is The Journey Through Wales written by Gerald of Wales in the late 12th century. The text discusses the travels of Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who “crossed the borders of Herefordshire and entered Wales.”10 His first act was to deliver a public sermon, which was translated into Welsh; upon hearing the words, Gerald “was the first to stand up. I threw myself at the holy man’s feet and devoutly took the sign of the Cross . . . I gave strong encouragement to the others and an added incentive to what they had just been told.”11 Within the first few pages, the “othering” that existed during the Middle Ages is abundantly evident: The Archbishop required a translator for his sermon, which was about taking on the Cross. The Welsh are seen as those in need of saving, at least through the perspective of the AngloNorman Archbishop. What makes this problematic is that Christianity already existed in Wales at this time. Gerald mentions Peter de Leia, “the Cluniac monk who was Bishop of St. David’s”12 who followed Gerald in embracing the Cross. If Christianity were already established in Wales, why would the Archbishop of Canterbury need to encourage the Welsh to take up the Cross? Thomas O’Loughlin explains: While the medieval West certainly had an image of its religious unity (expressed in maps, law and language) it had no experience of the actual uniformity in such matters as liturgy or the desire for uniformity in doctrinal expressions that characterize recent centuries. For example, only with print did liturgical uniformity over a wide area become possible.13 Because of the lack of uniformity in religious practice, some sects or denominations were seen as less than others. The hierarchal treatment of the Welsh by the Archbishop of Canterbury indicates a colonial desire to “save” those who were not proper Christians. This is simply one example of many in the observations Gerald recorded for the Archbishop throughout the text. Having students examine the treatment of the Welsh utilizing borderland theory – specifically the dichotomies that are established by comparing two groups – demonstrates the essence of “othering,” despite individuals living within close proximity to one another. According to Lewis Thorpe, Gerald’s outlook when writing the text was affected by his own personal borderland identity. Despite being raised in South Wales, he was the son of a Norman knight and his mother was only half-Welsh.14 When teaching the text, it is critical that this is kept in mind as it provides another inlet for the theoretical application. Since Gerald himself experienced a borderland identity – in that he was raised in Wales, yet possessed an Anglo-Norman identity – students can examine how the author’s position as a borderland entity manifested in the literature. Additionally, Gerald’s identity and the position he is in as the scribe of an “outsider” could create interesting conversation regarding identity acceptance and abandonment as well as whether people can select their own identities in the Middle Ages or if identity was assigned.15

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In the case of the Anglo-Scottish borderland, there was more conscious selectivity with identity. According to Mark P. Bruce and Katherine Terrell, “the AngloScottish border and the region surrounding it [was] a space of contact and exchange, a place of division that is also home to cross-border culture whose denizens can display an almost simultaneous antipathy and affection toward their counterparts on the other side.”16 One thing that severely affected identity formation was politics and landholdings. According to Cynthia Neville, there was “a casual attitude towards the particulars of national or political allegiances . . . [and] shared a common perspective in recognising that, like the Anglo-Scottish boundary itself, the line dividing family interest and national allegiance was a fluid elastic and eminently amenable to interpretation and manipulation.”17 It is important for students to recognize that while some borderlands like the medieval English-Welsh one treat identity in strict binaries, others like the Anglo-Scottish were more fluid. The flexibility of borders and political allegiances also allows for flexibility of identity. This identity fluidity appears in many medieval Scottish texts, particularly those from the Lowlands.18 One major example, especially in regards to Anglo-Scottish identity, is The Kingis Quair by King James I. Following an 18-year imprisonment in England, James I returned to Scotland and wrote the Quair around 1424. The text is an allegorical dream vision of his time in England, and his subsequent enlightenment and escape from captivity. He borrows heavily from the Chaucerian tradition; so much, in fact, that James honors Gower and Chaucer in the final stanza: Vnto the impnis of my maisteris dere, Gowere and Chaucere, that on the steppis satt Of rethorike quhill thai were lyvand here, Superlatiue as poetis laureate[.]19 [Into the hymns of my dear masters, Gower and Chaucer, that sit on the steps Of rhetoric while they were living here, Superlative as poets laureate.] Despite a blossoming literary tradition in Middle Scots, James desires to enter into an English one. Students can explore the implications of James’s final stanza and compare it to his line referring to his reading Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy in “fair Latyne tong,”20 implying a pre-existing continental dream vision in Scotland.21 If desired, students can also compare Kingis Quair to other Middle Scots texts from the early 15th century to gauge the differences in cultural blending that came from intercultural exchange with England. Another approach to understanding borderland theory in medieval British literature is through literature that grapples with the concept of identity, a cornerstone of borderland theory. This conflict is evident through the alliterative tradition and how the poetry in the later Middle Ages sparked a conversation regarding national versus regional identities. The Alliterative Revival during the Middle English period saw a surfeit of poetry utilizing a revitalized version of the Old English alliterative

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tradition. From the mid-12th to late 14th centuries, the tradition flourished across the British Isles, though not in a singular, unified form. While certain alliterative and poetic rules were adhered to, the poetry that emerged during this time period did not follow a specific format. Rather, variations in the form erupted depending upon geographical, cultural, and political variables. The theme of nationalism also became prominent as the British Isles began to define which geographical areas were parts of its nation. While some scholars believe these two takes can be mutually exclusive, the Alliterative Revival is not strictly indicative of regional and local literary pride or of thematic nationalistic fervor. Rather, the poetry of this Revival contributes many voices to an overarching national narrative through the alliterative style. When presenting literature from the Alliterative Revival within the classroom, it is important to identify how the texts can embrace both regional and national identities as well as how the hybridity of these identities fits into borderland theory. A paramount medieval alliterative text that displays a local and nationalist commentary is Piers Plowman by William Langland. The poem, a dream vision, begins with the narrator falling asleep and dreaming of a “felde ful of folke.”22 He encounters the character Mercy who instructs him to find Truth and “wolde that ye wrought as his worde techeth.”23 The narrator asks Mercy “How I may save my soule, that seynt art y-holden?”24 to which she responds: Whan alle tresores aren tried, Trewthe is the best. I do it on Deus Caritas to deme the sothe.25 [When all treasures are tried, Truth is the best. I declare it on Deus Caritas to state the truth.] The text provides clear evidence that it is a Christian allegory. Charles Moorman expounds upon this explaining that it is also a “much-touted ‘social satire’ (which is, strictly speaking, not satire at all) [which] is always subservient to the overall Christian tone and theme of the poem.”26 Through the framework of Christianity, Langland provides a voice for the “felde ful of folke.” Addressing Christianity in medieval literature in general is critical in comprehending many of the texts; examining the treatment of religion and how it is used to negotiate politics and identity could also be an interesting topic for students, particularly if they utilize the terminology of borderland theory. Moorman identifies Piers Plowman as a regional text. It comes from the Southern part of the British Isles, much like the “cheerfully Continental, dapper, courtly city poetry of London, elevated to a pitch of genius by Chaucer.”27 Piers Plowman hails from the country, however, and is therefore arguably different from that of Chaucer and the London poets, embracing what Moorman calls “primitivism . . . essentially a closeness to the elemental roots of things, a willingness to deal, in varying styles and images, with the conflicting passions and basic instincts of men.”28 By giving voice to the “common folk” through a religious allegory and utilizing the popular poetic form of alliteration, Langland is creating a nationalist work under the guise of local pride. Elizabeth Salter explains the “social and cultural situation” was responsible

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for “encouraging a form of literature with a strongly regional ground base, but with a live knowledge of affairs in the capital, and a desire to cater to tastes no less subtle than those for which Chaucer provided.”29 In fact, Piers Plowman, “with its involved theological discussions, is not the sort of poem that could hold the attention of back-country peasants or culturally underprivileged country gentlemen.”30 Langland’s use of the popular alliterative form also allows the message to be heard by more than the populace about whom he is writing. This text provides a type of nationalist literature in that a non-majority group from within the nation is being awarded the opportunity to contribute to the national narrative through a regional pride and socioeconomic narrative. While it is often risky to utilize modern theoretical approaches to older literature, the use of borderland theory on medieval literature from the British Isles can elucidate the texts for those who are often intimidated by them. As long as context is closely considered and the identities explored are clearly defined, students are able to better comprehend medieval identities through borderland theory. Additionally, newcomers to medieval literature can eliminate their own biases of medieval identities, identifying how they were much more complex than regional versus national narratives and what the implications of “othering” actually meant for those living in the borders. Utilizing borderland theory in the classroom allows for scholars and students alike to understand the complexities of medieval identity formation, allowing for a more critical examination of the literature rather than a compartmentalized approach.

Notes 1 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3. 2 George MacDonald Fraser, The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 21. 3 David Charles Douglas, William the Conqueror: The Norman Impact Upon England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 8–9. 4 Ibid., 344. 5 Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 246. 6 R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100– 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5. 7 AnaLouise Keating, “Introduction” to The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 10. 8 Jeffery Jerome Cohen, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffery Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 96. 9 With the exception of The Journey Through Wales, all translations of original text are my own. If the quotation exceeds one line, the translation is provided immediately following the quote. Otherwise, the translation follows the citation in the footnotes. 10 Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales/The Description of Wales, ed. and trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 74. 11 Ibid., 75. 12 Ibid., 75. 13 Thomas O’Loughlin, “Celtic Spirituality,” in The New SCM Dictionary of Spirituality, ed. Philip Sheldrake (London: SCM Press, 2005), 183.

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14 Lewis Thorpe, “Introduction,” in The Journey Through Wales/The Description of Wales, 9–10. 15 Another interesting point of discussion could be the use of the term “Welsh,” which comes from the Old English word “Wealh” meaning “foreigner.” 16 Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell, “Introduction,” in The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600, eds. Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 3. 17 Cynthia Neville, Land, Law and People in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 115. 18 In my dissertation, I argue the Lowlands are a type of cultural borderland with both England and the Highlands. Although James wrote the text in one of the royal burghs, somewhat far from the Anglo-Scottish border, the cultural borderland that existed during the 15th century was similar to that of the physical borderland. For further explanation, consult: Ruth Oldman, Negotiating the Nation: Imperialism, Multiculturalism, and The Evolution of Identity in Medieval Scottish Literature (ProQuest, 2016). 19 James Stewart, The Kingis Quair, ed. Matthew McDiarmid (London: Heinemann, 1973), ll. 1373–1379. 20 Ibid., l. 44. 21 Kylie Murray’s discovery of several Latin Boethius manuscripts produced in Scotland imply that the dream vision genre did not come to Scotland via England, as was previously thought. For more, see: Kylie Murray, “A New Scottish Boethius Manuscript: Rethinking Medieval Scotland’s Intellectual and Literary History,” The British Academy Review 26 (Summer 2015): 58–63. 22 William Langland, Piers Plowman, eds. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: Norton, 2006), Passus 1.2. Translation: Field full of folk. 23 Ibid., Passus 1.3. Translation: Would that you act as his word teaches. 24 Ibid., Passus 1.84. Translation: How may I save my soul, as saintly as you are? 25 Ibid., Passus 1.85–6. 26 Charles Moorman, “The English Alliterative Revival and the Literature of Defeat,” The Chaucer Review 16, no. 1 (1981): 88. 27 Ibid., 90. 28 Ibid., 90. 29 Elizabeth Salter, “The Alliterative Revival II,” Modern Philology 64, no. 3 (1967): 233. 30 Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 123.

19 TEACHING THE IMPORTANCE OF SPACE AND PLACE Robert Stepto’s “ritual grounds” Wendy Rountree

Teaching Ethnic American Literature comparatively can be a challenge in the college classroom. Often, students are unfamiliar with one or more of the disparate cultural traditions and unique group experiences of the four main ethnic groups in the United States – African American, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American. As a result, students are frequently reluctant to offer comments on situations portrayed in ethnic texts or simply avoid participation in class discussions. Some students are concerned that their comments may seem uninformed or prejudiced in front of classmates and/or their instructor. By introducing key concepts and themes that are prevalent in Ethnic American Literature, students learn to apply clearly defined literary tools to texts while allowing the instructor to encourage deeper analysis of the texts and understanding of disparate cultural experiences and perspectives. Ultimately, the concepts and themes empower students’ engagement with the texts, specifically, and the class, in general. Additionally, the key concepts and themes are simultaneously culturally specific yet can be related to students’ own personal experiences. Since teaching and learning are both very personal and intimate experiences for both the instructor and the student, one of the best ways for students to enter the learning process is through accessing their personal experience while studying unfamiliar cultural traditions and experiences, especially in an Ethnic American Literature course.

Basic course organization The courses typically include texts by African American, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American writers with at least one representative text by a man and a woman author. Before students begin examining texts from each ethnic group, they read relevant, brief histories of the ethnic groups’ experiences in the United States from works such as Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural

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America (1993) or Barbara Rico and Sandra Mano’s American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context (2000). Students analyze gender, class, and ethnicity as well as key themes such as “Search for Identity,” “Quest for Freedom,” “Fear,” and “Rebellion.” These themes are taught concurrently as both universal and culturally specific. Students can quickly identify with these themes from their own personal and cultural experiences, often offering lived examples during class discussions. In addition to key themes, students are also introduced to three key concepts: vernacular tradition, double consciousness, and ritual grounds. These literary tools create the foundation on which students learn how to compare texts intra-culturally and inter-culturally. Each of the cultural groups have their own vernacular traditions – folktales, folk characters, language/slang/dialect – that can be learned and analyzed; W. E. B. DuBois’s double consciousness also can be appropriated and applied to the lived experiences of each ethnic group. However, for students one of the most accessible concepts to understand and to employ in textual analysis has been ritual grounds. This essay contextualizes Stepto’s ritual grounds concept within African American culture, history, and literary history; illustrates how to teach and to apply the concept as a literary tool, utilizing such textual examples as Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (2009); and briefly discusses how the concept is applicable to teaching other Ethnic American literary texts. In the seminal text From Behind the Veil (1977, 1991), Robert Stepto defines the theoretical concept of “ritual grounds” as “those specifically Afro-American spatial configurations within the structural topography that are, in varying ways, elaborate responses to social structure in this world [. . .] [T]hey serve as a spatial expression of the tensions and contradictions besetting any reactionary social structure, aggressive or latent, subsumed by a dominate social structure” (69).1 These dual spatial locations, “ritual grounds,” can have unique symbolic meanings. For African Americans, their communities can be “ritual grounds,” “black spaces” where they are generally separated from surrounding “white spaces.” The borders of the “ritual ground” are seen as barriers between “black and white spaces,” which suggests an illusion of protection from white oppression. In other words, spatial locations, “ritual grounds,” can have unique symbolic meanings. For African-Americans, their communities/homes can be “ritual grounds,” “black spaces” where they are generally separated from surrounding “white spaces.” The borders of the “ritual ground” are seen as not only boundaries but barriers between “black and white spaces,” which suggest an illusion of protection from white oppression. For example, during slavery Black slaves lived on plantations, unsafe “white spaces,” where they were exposed to physical and sexual violence. When Blacks were in their slave quarters, designated “black spaces,” they could participate in cultural activities such as storytelling, which created a sense of home, community, and affinity. Even so, the safety of the slave quarter could be undermined because of its vulnerability to the actions of slave owners; slaves could be raped, killed, and beaten while in the slave quarters. Therefore, the “ritual

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ground” is a dual, sometimes conflicted, space. During lectures on key themes and concepts, the duality of these ritual grounds is stressed, highlighting that these locations must possess both positive and negative aspects for the character. They must elicit psychological ease and anxiety simultaneously. Students are asked to discuss in their own words how the slave quarters can be a ritual ground then are asked to think of other possible examples in the African American community. Typical suggestions are the following: churches, barbershops, beauty salons, schools, family homes, and grandmothers’ houses. As class discussion continues, students are introduced to the idea that regions like the South can also be ritual grounds as well as how basements, porches, and kitchens are reoccurring ritual grounds in African American Literature – the porch where Janie relays her life story to Pheoby in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and the basement where the narrator relays his story to the reader in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), for example. Based on the definition and after the lecture, most students have a grasp of the concept and can employ the tool in their own lives, identifying locations where family reunions, bar and bat mitzvahs, or Catholic confirmations have been held, among other locales. Students also begin to realize how many of the concepts and themes overlap and/or inform each other (like ritual grounds and cultural/personal identity) and textual analyses. To better illustrate how to apply and teach the ritual ground concept to a text, an analysis of Senna’s Caucasia and Whitehead’s Sag Harbor follows.

Danzy Senna’s Caucasia According to Hershini Bhana Young, “Caucasia’s story about two sisters, the protagonist Birdie, who is compelled to pass as white while living with her white, revolutionary mother, and Cole, who travels with her black father to Brazil and Berkeley, is a riveting read. One sees both black and white America through Birdie’s teenage eyes, the result being a humorous and insightful snapshot of racial politics that ranges from 1970s revolutionary zeal to a contemporary “utopic” embrace of mixed-race difference” (287).2 Nearly every location in Senna’s text functions as a ritual ground (dual, conflicted spaces) for the fair-skinned Birdie. Whether visiting her maternal grandmother’s home in Cambridge or attending Nkruma, the Black Power School in Roxbury (Boston) or Mona’s trailer home or the Marshes upperclass home in small town New Hampshire, Birdie’s perceptions of herself are in constant flux based on the various borders and thresholds she crosses. In a Callaloo interview with Claudia M. Milian Arias, Senna states, “With Birdie, people see what they want to see. Like a Rorschach test, where a person is shown an amorphous ink-blot image and has to say what image or emotion each design evokes, Birdie’s ambiguous features reveal people’s hidden racial desires” (449).3 Birdie’s self-identity is constantly challenged and dominated by the perceptions of others about her body. “Our bodies may play tricks on us, they may lead people who ‘read’ them to conclusions other than those we intend, all unsettling possibilities – certainly so for those whose bodies seemingly are in contradiction with their self-defined identities,

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as is sometimes the case with those of mixed race” (Leverette 111).4 Birdie does not choose to deny her black identity although others do. (For example, Ali as a child at The Black Power School who calls her “white,” her mother when she is on the run from the FBI who makes her pretend she is Jewish (later Birdie drops Jewishness which is signified by the Star of David necklace she wears), her maternal grandmother who constantly ignores Cole and highlights Birdie’s Eurocentric features, even her own father’s obvious preference for Cole). Instead, Birdie seeks to embrace her cultural identity. Lori Harrison-Kahan even suggests that the novel itself “casts blackness as the ideal, desired identity” (20).5 According to Tru Leverette in “Re-visions of Difference in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia,” “Caucasia posits the meanings of mixed race when the individual finds herself beyond the boundaries of home and cast into the public world” (113).6 For this brief discussion, I posit that even in their home, the brownstone on Columbus Avenue, both Birdie, the protagonist, and her sister, Cole, do not really feel entirely comfortable. Home is typically defined as a place of residence or refuge. For the siblings, Columbus Avenue is a location of some joy and acceptance but later pain and alienation for both children. While Deck (a Harvard-educated intellectual who seems to care more for his abstract ideas than family) and Sandy Lee (the daughter of a Harvard professor who finds solace in radical politics and identifying with the working man) seemingly initially attempt to create a safe, loving home for their children, it quickly becomes questionable whether they can. The reader can only infer from stories told to Birdie and her vague memories about the happier times shared by her parents. Instead, we learn about their constant fighting. Even, Birdie comments that they never say “I love you” only “I miss you” (Senna 19).7 The parents are depicted as opposites beyond “race” – in temperament and in implementation for social change. She thinks their dysfunction is her fault; “I [know] their marriage [began] to sour at about the same time as my birth” (19).8 The parents, based on growing differences, wanted to call her two different names. Patrice after (Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese liberator) for the father, and Jesse after (her great-grandmother, a white suffragette) for her mother. The name Birdie is a compromise because Cole had wanted a parakeet for her birthday instead of a sister. “For a while, I answered to all three names with a schizophrenic zeal. But in the end, even my parents grew tired of the confusion and called me Birdie, though my birth certificate still reads, ‘Baby Lee,’ like the gravestone of some still born child” (9).9 In the naming and circumstances of her birth, Birdie’s existence is in limbo. Later, after they separate the father sometimes calls her Patrice and her mother begins to call her Jesse. On Columbus Avenue, Birdie and Cole experience the most comfort – with each other and separate from their parents – in their own world. In fact, Birdie expresses that she “felt incomplete outside of her [sister’s] presence, . . . felt safe with her beside me” (90).10 Birdie describes the attic as “our world”: Our world [is] the attic. Up there, we [perform] for each other with the costumes that [are] stuffed in a trunk at the end of the bed. The attic [has] a crooked and creaking floor, a slanted roof so low that grown-ups had to

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hunch over when they came up there to visit, and a half-moon window that looked out onto Columbus Avenue. Across the street [sits] a red brick housing project, and beyond that, we could just glimpse the tip of the Prudential. I [have] some vague understanding that beyond our window, outside the attic, lay danger – the world, Boston, and all the problems that came with the city. When Cole and I [are] alone in our attic, speaking Elemeno and making cities out of stuffed animals, it seem[s] that the outside world [is] as far away as Timbuktu – some place that could never touch us. We [are] the inside, the secret and fun and make-believe, and that [is] where I [want] to stay. (6–7)11 Leverette suggests that “The attic room they share as children becomes a utopian site exclusive of the forces of the outer world, a space where Birdie can act as herself, freed from the specific racial performances the world demands outside, this is the only space in which she can be, without conflict, the daughter of her white mother and black father” (114).12 In the home the girls share a utopian land/people and a created language that the sisters share – Elemeno. “Cole [explains] to me that it [isn’t] just a language, but a place and a people as well. I [have] heard this before, but it never fail[s] to entertain me, her description of the land I [hope] to visit some day” (Senna 7).13 While the attic becomes a physical ritual ground for the girls within their home; Elemeno is the imaginary, psychological ritual ground created within the world of the attic that becomes the most lasting and powerful ones for the girls. “Elemeno, a neologism of the girls’ favorite letters of the alphabet, is a language that adults are prevented from knowing, prevented from entering the girls’ imagined third space, its actuality having been hammered repeatedly by the barricades of reality, affecting the development of their ‘subjectivity’” (Moore 116).14 It is Elemeno (now broken and stilted) that Birdie and Cole use to speak to one another once they are reunited at the end of the novel in Berkeley. This becomes their linguistic site of reconnection thus solidifying its importance. Interestingly, once Deck decides to leave Sandy and Columbus Avenue, he literally never crosses the threshold again. “My father wouldn’t come into the house” (55).15 Once he is gone, embracing aspects of The Black Power Movement, Birdie’s “hybridity” is emphasized within the home even more so as well as in the outside world. Deck picks up the girls on weekends but focuses his attention on Cole. “Cole [has been] my father’s special one. I [understand] that even [now] she [is] his prodigy – his young, gifted, and black. At the time, I wasn’t sure why it was Cole and not me, but I [know] that when they [come] together, I [disappear]. Her existence comforted him. She [is] the proof that his blackness hadn’t been completely blanched” (55–56).16 As if to prepare Cole to face a racist world as a black child, he directs his lectures on race, the movement, and African Diaspora history towards her and not Birdie. Birdie’s father reinforces racial difference between the sisters, and Columbus Avenue is forever changed in Birdie’s mind.

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Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor Sag Harbor, an incorporated village in Suffolk County, New York, in the towns of East Hampton and Southampton, is a classic example of an African American ritual ground as defined by Stepto. Therefore, the ritual ground is concurrently a dual, sometimes conflicted, physical space possessing affirmative and oppositional qualities. For instance, for 15 year old Benji, Whitehead’s protagonist, Sag Harbor is a safe space where he can reacquaint himself with his Sag Harbor (aka black friends) during the summer and learn the latest black cultural slang and trends. Yet, he is also aware of the segregated origins from which his summer enclave derived, of the elitist, exclusionary attitudes of some residents, and the strict social rules, protocols, and expectations one abides by within this ritual ground. Whether being chastised by his father for having a “Street” haircut or joked by his friends for listening to the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Benji selectively resists the Sag Harbor “black etiquette codes,” whereas his older sister Elena absolutely rejected them, never returning for summer visits since leaving for college. “Her final summer, she was too hip and strange and ‘white-acting’ for the Sag Harbor boys and girls she’d grown up with, and went out to find others like her, her fellow unlikelies. She never brought them around, but she must have found her tribe” (Whitehead 235–236).17 Specific social codes (signifiers such as clothing, speech, music, etc.) illustrate another aspect of ritual grounds, a psychological one. I posit that ethnic collective identity (a notion from social identity theory – that identifying with and belonging to social groups (e.g. religious groups or occupational groups, in this case an ethnic group)) serves an important basis for one’s identity – is the psychological ritual ground for African Americans which has dictated prescriptive characteristics of “blackness” and has discouraged performative behaviors that are non-consistent with that paradigm. In the African American community, some like his sister Elena, and more surreptitiously Benji, resist an unquestioning identification with an ethnic collective identity, to avoid marginalizing their individuality. In “Post-Black Stories: Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor and Racial Individualism,” Cameron Leader-Picone states: “[Whitehead’s] description of Sag Harbor evinces the breakdown in the relationship between individual and collective identity undergirding the linkages among all African Americans ‘viewing themselves within a political context in which gains for any members of the community are seen as gains for the black community as a whole” (430).18 Yet still, “Whitehead portrays a generation that remains cognizant of a shared racial culture and common political interests, but for who such bonds are weakening” (432),19 “emphasizing the confining structure of a collective black identity” (Leader-Picone 435).20 Stepto’s theoretical concept of “ritual grounds” and ethnic collective identity is useful to discussing sites of geography and identity. These racialized spatial and psychological locations possess unique symbolic meaning – each offering sites of resistance for African Americans from cultural hegemony and from within their

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own communal circles. Nearly every Sag Harbor location mentioned in Whitehead’s meticulously detailed text (topographic word map of sorts) is arguably a ritual ground – the Olympia movie palace, the “scrabbly baseball field” (16),21 the park, Jonni Waffle ice cream shop, for example. However, the focus of this analysis is how Sag Harbor itself functions as a ritual ground for a segment of the African American Community and for Benji. Historically, Sag Harbor was a home to free black whalers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were only allowed to live in a designated part of town; no choice was involved. African Americans like founder Maude Terry in the 1930s and 40s “chose to summer there for . . . [a] [. . .] pragmatic reason. [A]fter the Civil War, New York, like many Northern states, practiced de facto segregation. Unwelcome among whites, black whalers settled in communities considered less desirable – in the case of the East End, Sag Harbor’s waterfront and the Eastville neighborhood Blacks continued the tradition into the early twentieth century by taking over the old whaler cottages and building homes there” (2–3).22 Benji’s late, maternal grandparents are from this generation. “The house my grandparents built was a small Cape Cod, white with dark shingles on the roof and red wood bracing the second story. It was made of cinder block, stacks of it hauled out on the backs on my grandfather’s truck. Every weekend he brought out a load, rattling down the highway. This was before they put in the Long Island Expressway, you understand. It took a while. Every weekend, he and the local talent put up what they could before he had to get back to his business on Monday. Eventually he and my grandmother had their house. Their piece of Sag Harbor” (Whitehead 245).23 What was once a forced exiled existence, African Americans appropriated; Sag Habor became a self-regulated, exclusive refuge. Not only did African Americans desire a space of their own; they self-segregated, not wanting any whites in the area. “That first generation asked, Can we make it work? Will they allow us to have this? It doesn’t matter what the world says, they answered each other. This place is ours” (Whitehead 38).24 Benji remembers his and his friends maintained the same sentiments. When an older white couple is spied walking on their beach, one of Benji’s friends, Bobby – the preppy, militant says, “We should go down there and tell them to get off our beach” (Whitehead 35).25 Benji explains, “[Bobby] lived in Ninevah, down the way hence his interest in keeping the sands undefiled by outsiders, but everybody in the developments, whether they lived on the beach or not, felt that selfish tug of ownership when they saw strangers – i.e., white people – on our stretch” (35–36).26 This desire to maintain and defend this ritual ground is expressed repeatedly by actual long-time and current residents. Lawrence Otis Graham, author of The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002) says, “’When vacationing among our own, in places that have been embraced by us for so long, there is a comfort – and a sanctity – that makes it possible to forget that there is a white power structure touching our lives at all” (Gross 1).27 In Nina Tobler’s book, Voices of Sag Harbor: A Village Remembers (2007), long-time resident Michael A. Butler’s uncle purchased a home on Division Street in the 1930s and built cottages in Eastville. “Part of the appeal was having

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a place of the family’s own, to lay down roots and not have to worry about living in a world that was mostly white, and often hostile” (Peterson 3).28 Additionally, many black professionals select to live in Sag Harbor for their children, children who attend predominately white public and private schools; they want their children “to be with kids who looked like [them]” (Peterson 4).29 The affirmation of kinship within the ritual ground offers respite from white oppression during the weekends and/or summers and the borders must be guarded. Thus, properties are typically sold through word of mouth, from friend to friend. It must be noted that the category of outsider also can be ascribed to African Americans of lower socioeconomic classes as well. Although the residents self-segregate, they are aware of their invisibility to the residents outside of their neighborhoods. Benji remarks that in the official Guide to Sag Harbor: Landmarks, Homes & History, “We knew where our neighborhood began because that’s where the map ended. The black part of town was off in the margins” (Whitehead 18).30 Socio-economic status cannot completely counter discrimination. Andrea Levine’s article, “‘In His Own Home’: Gendering the African American Domestic Sphere in Contemporary Culture,” further comments on the vulnerability of this ritual ground within the context of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. House/Police incident. The questions raised by the Gates incident of who belongs in what kind of home – and what the inhabitants of those homes are free to do within their “own” walls – are ones at the heart of Colson Whitehead’s critically acclaimed 2009 novel, Sag Harbor. The text interrogates the fantasy of ‘safety’ in the upper-middle-class African American sphere, absent (sic) the sort of coercive state intervention that the Gates affair illustrates so starkly. [. . .] Sag Harbor makes clear that class privilege may fail to insulate African American families either from the violence of the public sphere or from the intimate gendered violences that often emerge in response to that public sphere. (172)31 Such vulnerabilities highlight how ritual grounds can become marred spaces, despite affluence. Ultimately, despite Elena’s warning “Just do me a favor, Benji, and get out when you can” (237),32 Benji in due course remembers Sag Harbor, to a great extent, as analogous to his grandfather’s beach house. He thinks, “My lost love’s face was the two windows facing the street, the front door for a nose, and the three brick steps for a mouth” (248).33 As he and a childhood friend, Melanie, go through the house, retracing his past, mulling over old memories, he discovers, “It wasn’t the house I was in love with. It was what I put in it. [. . .] We were a family [then] . . . before it all went wrong” (251–252).34 For Benji and his friends, memories and signifiers occupy this geographical space. Sag Harbor is indeed a physical and psychological ritual ground for Benji (as well as Whitehead) – a place he simultaneously remembers fondly, with humor, and ultimately, as a cherished safe harbor.

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As demonstrated in this essay, Stepto’s Ritual Grounds is an excellent concept to use to teach place and space in literary texts. Although the concept is rooted in African American experience and literary criticism, it is extremely effective in the comparative study of Ethnic American Literature. Esperanza’s home in Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street, the narrator’s school in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, or Tayo’s pueblo in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony all can be studied using ritual grounds. Utilizing the Ritual Grounds concept in our classroom enables instructors an opportunity to teach literature and cross-cultural knowledge within an accessible paradigm.

Notes 1 Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, 1991), 69. 2 Hershini Bhana Young, “Black ‘Like Me’: (Mis)Recognition, the Racial Gothic, and the Post-1967 Mixed-Race Movement in Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic,” African American Review 42, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 287. 3 Claudia M. Milian Arias, “An Interview With Danzy Senna,” Callaloo 25, no. 2 (2002): 449. 4 Tru Leverette, “Re-visions of Difference in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia,” Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora 12, no. 1 (September 2011): 111. 5 Lori Harrison-Khan, “Passing for White, Passing for Jewish: Mixed Race Identity in Danzy Senna and Rebecca Walker,” MELUS 30, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 20. 6 Leverette, “Re-visions of Difference in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia,” 113. 7 Danzy Senna, Caucasia (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 19. 8 Ibid., 19. 9 Ibid., 9. 10 Ibid., 90. 11 Ibid., 6–7. 12 Leverette, “Re-visions of Difference in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia,” 114. 13 Senna, Caucasia, 7. 14 Geneva Cobb Moore, “Caucasia’s Migrating Bodies: Lessons in American History and Postmodernism,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 36, no. 2 (2011): 116. 15 Senna, Caucasia, 55. 16 Ibid., 55–56. 17 Colson Whitehead, Sag Habor (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 235–236. 18 Cameron Leader-Picone, “Post-Black Stories: Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor and Racial Individualism,” Contemporary Literature 56, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 430. 19 Ibid., 432. 20 Ibid., 435. 21 Whitehead, Sag Harbor, 16. 22 Audrey Peterson, “Sag Harbor Works to Save History,” Hamptons, accessed April 8, 2017, https://hamptons-magazine.com/sag-harbor-african-american-communities. 23 Whitehead, Sag Harbor, 245. 24 Ibid., 38. 25 Ibid., 35. 26 Ibid., 35–36. 27 Jane Gross, “Comfort and Refuge in Black Hamptons Enclave,” The New York Times (July 16, 2002), accessed April 1, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/nyregion/comfortand-refuge-in-black-hamptons-enclave.html. 28 Audrey Peterson, “Sag Harbor Works to Save History,” 3. 29 Ibid., 4.

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30 Whitehead, Sag Harbor, 18. 31 Andrea Levine, “‘In His Own Home’: Gendering the African American Domestic Sphere in Contemporary Culture,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 172. 32 Whitehead, Sag Harbor, 237. 33 Ibid., 248. 34 Ibid., 251–252.

20 MULTIPLE IDENTITIES AND IMAGINATIVE SPATIALITY IN KIPLING’S KIM AND RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN Safia Sahli

The construction of imaginative geographies of India in colonial and postcolonial writings with their assumed ideologies is part of the broader goal of understanding and constructing representations of the spaces of adventure and of building identities. This chapter explores the paradigm of space and identity in two IndianEnglish novels, Kim and Midnight’s Children written by two writers from two different geographical spaces, but whose common playground is India, the colonial space. Indeed, the complex paradigm between space and identity is represented in an “imaginative country,” India. A blurring mixture between a fictional reality and imaginative truth is displayed in the adventures of two protagonists, Kim and Saleem, two hybrid boys in their quest for their identities in a space colonized for more than two hundred years by Britain. The first thing that both narratives share is the playground or the setting they write about, India, this country that could have never existed except by “the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream” (Midnight’s Children 129–130). Both writers are determined to embrace the India of their dreams and memories in their fiction, coming up with a multifaceted imaginary space, full of possible alternative identities as it allows them to tell their own stories in their own voices and from their own view point. While Rushdie’s novel celebrates the creation of the nation in the imaginative image of the Self, thus playing with the personal and national identity by trying to reconcile Saleem’s multiple identities, Kipling denies the concept of multiplicity and builds the identity of his hero through the movement between two worlds, the Indian and the English, to end up announcing his loyalty to the mother country by becoming a “Sahib” and forcing the Self to the image of the nation. Salman Rushdie has much in common with Rudyard Kipling as they veer between two nations that can be considered as their homes and they use the English language to write about India, each from his own perspective and social construction. While

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Rushdie considers the Indian-English writing as the “Empire’s bastard child,” being himself a product of culturally mixed background, a hybrid or as he plainly puts it in his novel “a mongrel,” Kipling writes about the imaginary India of his childhood, an India of permanence. Kim, as the title of Kipling’s novel suggests, is the name of an English child, in India during the British Raj, who embarks on a journey with an elderly Tibetan Lama in the pursuit of his quest. Although it is a political novel, it is categorized as an adventure story displaying the boyish escapades of a young Anglo Indian protagonist across India. As a work of imperial adventure, the narrative represents India as a space open to colonial gaze, and its exotic side allows the character’s masculine exploits and heroic deeds as Harold Bloom claims: “Kim is one of the greatest instances in the language of a popular adventure story that is also exalted literature” (Rudyard Kipling’s Kim 4). Kipling’s Anglo India represents an early twentieth century geographical imaginary, one that emphasizes a stable metropolitan history of individual and cultural development. The remarkable thing about Kim is the extent to which it chooses to ignore the dreary reality of colonial India in favor of a more exciting idealized situation. Kipling was well aware of the changes taking place in India; however, he longed for the India of his childhood, a passive space, “an India of permanence.” He feared most the political turmoil and the rise of a national resistance. His narrative illustrates an awareness of the reality of Empire, of its explorative nature, and expresses an anxiety of the possibility that those who were dominated for more than three hundred years would retaliate with anger and revenge. Therefore, the apparent confidence in the colonial narrative hides an anxiety of the loss of the Jewel of the crown. Indeed, India is the most profitable British overseas dominion. It has gained a tremendous and influential role in British life, and its different fields, political, social, commercial, ideological and cultural as well. Therefore, the political unrest of the late nineteenth century had a great impact on the security of the British government and launched the process of independence. As a reaction, Kipling preferred to overlook this reality and hold on to the nostalgic phase of the British imperial zenith. Seen from this perspective, the India represented in Kim is a “timeless, unchanging, and ‘essential’ locale, a place almost as much poetic as it is actual in geographical concreteness” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 162). As a result, one may foreground two chronologies during the writing of Kim, the historical chronology, or the real time, and the imperial time as it is imagined by the writer and deliberately represented to children and readers alike. It is as Sara Suleri notices, “a necessary evasion of history,” involving a conscious act trying to cover the “ambivalence with which empire declares its unity powers” (The Rhetoric of English India 114–115). Francis Hutchins points to the fact that an imaginary India is “created [containing] no elements of either social change or political menace” (cited in Said, Culture 180). This ambivalence makes part of a whole process of stereotyping the Orientals as a chaotic nation craving for British control and order. Kim’s youth and energy are obviously opposed to an ageing India colonized for more than three hundred years and symbolized by the Tibetan Lama. This

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marvelous boy is able to explore spaces, the Indian and the English, by crossing from one to another with a heroic elegance as if to confound the authority of colonial barriers, and finds pleasure in this game. The moments in the narrative, where Kim “banters, bargains, repartees with his elder friends and hostile alike, are indications of Kipling’s seemingly inexhaustible fund of boyish enjoyment in the sheer momentary pleasure of playing a game, any sort of game” (Said 166). Nevertheless, Said reminds the reader of the necessity of not being mistaken by these “boyish pleasures,” since they do not oppose the British colonizat ion of India. In fact, the novel delineates a fantasy of integration between the oppositional roles of colonizer and colonized, of the master who rules and the child who desires, and Kim does ironically announce Kipling’s choice of England over India as he is often reminded by Col. Creighton, the head of the British Secret Service in India, “Thou art a Sahib and the son of a Sahib” (126). Kim is a late nineteenth-century novel fully concerned with the mechanics of ruling an empire, through the use of the art of disguise which allows British imperialism to be invisible to sight and, hence, a strategic act of containment. Imperial agents are invisible only to their supervisors; they have special codes as C25, 1.B. or R.17. The art of disguise does already exist in Kim, the street boy, running wild in the bazaar; he “was born in the land. He has friends. He goes where he chooses. He is a chabuk sawai (a sharp chap). He needs only to change his clothing, and in a twinkling he would be a low – caste Hindi boy” (115). The strategy of disguise is adopted in the narrative to better infiltrate and know from within what cannot be rationalized from without. In order to rule a postmutiny India and secure its presence, Kim foregrounds the necessity to become invisible, infiltrate the heterogeneity of the territory and melt in the crowd. Kim, the boy, whose fluency in native speech and disguise, familiarity with the crowd enable him to traverse different walks of life and various cultures: Hindu, Mohamedan, and Buddhist. His friendship with a Tibetan Lama and an Afghan horse dealer, on the one hand, and Col. Creighton and Lurgan Sahib on the other hand, represent his “blurring identities.” As a matter of fact, his ability to move between two worlds, the Indian and the British, allow him to enter the “Great Game” and betray his loyalty to his home country. Kim in Kipling’s novel feels at ease in his “natural” surrounding India, he behaves, talks, acts and bargains like a native boy though the reader is made aware of his real race right from the first page of the narrative. The novel celebrates in one way the boyish pleasures of Kim in an exotic, oriental India, where he goes on a journey full of adventures, trade, intrigue and encounters with natives, English men and Russian spies. He is determined to move freely in this vast colonial space, India: “I too must go a-travelling” (115) he announces to the Lama. According to British rulers, one must know the land, its language, customs, traditions and culture in order to rule it efficiently. And in this important mission Kim, the young almost native protagonist, is of precious help. “No white man knows the land and the customs of the land as thou knowest” (97) the Lama confesses.

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His magic capacity to go native allows him to integrate the imperial machinery as Mills claims: “Going native” is a phrase which describes the way in which certain European travellers and residents abroad adopted the dress and customs of the people of the colonized country and politically aligned themselves with that culture [. . .] It has strong negative connotations – integrating and identifying oneself with a colonised community is seen to be telling the side down. (98) Kim is used by both the English and native adults to fulfill the imperial project of espionage, because of his confusing identity, and comprehensive knowledge of customs, dialect and costumes. His predisposition towards such activity as disguise makes him perfectly suited to this business. Kim’s “openness towards the “Other,” is based on a greater awareness of potential identity and a heightened sense of the concrete socio-politico-cultural differences between self and “Other” (cited in Ashcroft et al., The Post 22) which makes up Kim’s functional imperial identity This fluidity (lack of fixed identity) leads him to have close and sympathetic interaction with the natives of different ethnic, social and racial divides. Moreover, his knowledge of native customs, costumes and dialects make him an appropriate “pony” with a potential that would be shaped and sharpened to the needs of the imperial machinery: Kim is portrayed in the narrative as externally at least “Mohamedan,” Mark Kinkead-Weekes observes: Kim’s more than chameleon ability to change, not only his clothes, but his voice, and mannerisms, his whole identity, represents [. . .] something more than creative and imaginative in Kipling: not merely the observer’s sharp eye, but the dramatist’s longing to get into the skin of many ‘others’. (cited in Ford 217) The version of Empire offered in Kipling’s Kim, in which a restless and timeless India, that needs the presence of the British, is ruled by good-natured Englishmen, and Rushdie’s version of India since 1947 are both children’s histories of an imaginary space, Midnight’s Children being a post-independence version of Kim. It is indeed a critical investigation of historical facts and colonial constructed realities, and so the young native protagonist, Saleem, is Kim’s alter ego whose former accounts play the role of a counter-memory that “creates its own reality, and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own”(Midnight’s Children 268). Saleem is Kipling’s alter ego and to this latter’s question about his identity “who I am?”(Kim 123) the former provides the adequate answer “I am the sum of everything that went before me” (383). While Kim is handsome, Saleem is ugly with a big nose and a bad ear. Kim is “the little friend of the world,” however Saleem fails to become the big brother of 581 children. Kipling ends his story before Kim

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becomes a man; Saleem grows up and the novel does not end until he is thirty. Kim is about to find himself, as a sahib, Saleem is about to lose himself, he is already beginning to crack. During the emergency period decided by Indira Ghandi, there is little left for Saleem to do but pick up the few pieces of his life and write the chronicle that encompasses both his story and that of his young nation. It is interesting to notice that Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem, like Kipling’s colonial Kim is a hybrid character and has multiple roots. As a matter of fact, Kim is the son of an Irish soldier, brought up by a half-caste woman who pretends to be his aunt. Saleem is born to English and a low-caste Hindu, brought up in a Muslim family who believe him to be their son. Both Kim and Saleem have many substitute parents, surrogate fathers for Kim and alternative parents for Saleem. Kim is an orphan child faced with a multitude of potential father figures varying from Indians to English. Like his white counterpart, the native hero of Rushdie’s novel goes on a journey of self exploration in India. This “great and wonderful land” (Midnight’s Children 239) becomes Saleem’s playground and has the special quality of a haven, a secret place where his magical fantasy can flourish thanks to his magical telepathic qualities that would allow him to move freely like Kim, embark on adventures and talk with his imaginary friends as well as all the Indian children born at the stroke of midnight announcing India’s independence. Widely regarded as a landmark of postcolonial and postmodern fiction, Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children is a multi-layered novel about Saleem Sinai, a child born at the very moment of India’s independence from British colonial rule, and his exciting and fantastic adventures that join his story to the story of his country. It is the adventure story of a hybrid protagonist that creates a nation in the imaginative image of the self by reconstructing and recreating the past in an artful blurring between fiction and facts. However, when read as a literary construct, it is by no means a rewriting of history set as a response to the colonial representation of Kipling’s India in Kim and, thus, opening up the space for the oppressed, and subjugated “Other.” It enables them to tell their own stories in their own voices as national adventures. The novel traces the development of Saleem and the history of his family as his modern Indian nation develops. He is depicted as the embodiment of his national, deeply historic culture. The fact of being simply born along with a thousand other children, on the stroke of his nation’s birth, does in fact symbolize his nation, modern political India. In writing his novel, Rushdie also brought the history of twentieth century India to the West. Rather than forcing the self into the image of the nation as the British colonial protagonist Kim does, Rushdie “comically and mock-heroically insists on creating Nation in the imaginative image of self ” (Shah, “Nation and Narration” 78). As a product of postcolonial India, Saleem must piece together the multifarious fragments of his identity, just as India must begin anew in rebuilding her identity in the wake of colonialism. Rushdie’s choice of English as the vehicle of his novels announces his lineage with Kipling; it is an ancestry that links him tightly to Kim, where the English language is used in the novel as the best means to encapsulate “the whole of reality”

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(Midnight’s Children 75) to map India. Midnight’s Children has much in common with Kim and could be considered as a post-independence rewriting of the colonial novel as they share many points like their respective authors. Switched at birth by a nurse, in the hospital, Saleem is raised by parents who are not biologically his own. Because of the magic timing of his birth as a midnight child that coincides with the declaration of India’s independence, Saleem is coveted by his parents’ neighbors, he says “even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself, and I am bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject” (Midnight’s Children 62). Such hybridity is suggested in the novel by the multiple heritages of the narrator who has many fathers (Methwold, Wee Willie Winkie and Ahmed Sinai) and mothers (Amina, Mary and Pia), but the most ironic lineage is the British William Methwold who is the biological father of Saleem and not Ahmed Sinai, thus suggesting the “composite and bastard legacy of Indians, both Western and dramatically Indian” (cited in Mitra 113). These multiple parentages are intricately related to Saleem’s fragmentation of identity that haunts him throughout the whole narrative. One could claim that Saleem Sinai is “the Empire’s bastard child” (cited in Rege 346). Consequently, each individual can claim an identity of his own and his own version of history, yet this version has to merge with the multitudes so that he becomes part of a whole synthesis. This attitude is noticeably depicted throughout the whole novel, when Saleem pompously announces “I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me” (157). His deep belief remains unchanged and he reasserts it: “I have been I have been so-many too-many persons” (158). Rushdie confirms his position as a postcolonial writer, and emphasizes the importance of belonging to two countries. Growing up in a country that was deeply influenced by British rule, attending elite British schools and immigrating to England has greatly westernized his perspective, being a product of a culturally mixed background, a hybrid or as he plainly puts it in his novel “a mongrel.” He considers that postcolonial Indian writers who have migrated away from India “are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective because they are at the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of whole sight” (Imaginary Homelands 19). Due to his multiple backgrounds, Rushdie could be considered as the product of multiple identities like his narrator. In a 1983 interview conducted by John Pilger, he claims that three places have influenced his life: India, his birth place; Pakistan, where his family lived; and England. This “multiple rooting” has led to multiple identities which are thoroughly tackled in Midnight’s Children through his protagonist Saleem, and his quest to reconcile his own multiple identities. The concept of multiplicity so long denied in Kim, for fear of losing control over Indians, in an attempt to represent a homogenous portrayal of the natives as “Other,” is disrupted in Midnight’s Children as the following quotation shows:

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One of the most absurd aspects of this quest for national authenticity is that – as far as India is concerned anyway – it is completely fallacious to suppose that there is such a thing as a pure, tradition from which to draw [. . .] The rest of us understand that the very essence of Indian culture is that we possess a mixed tradition, a mélange of elements as disparate as ancient Mughal and contemporary Coca-Cola American. ( Imaginary Homelands 67) He further gives a definition of India as “the crowd and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once” (32). The multiplicity of India is a dominant theme in Midnight’s Children and is referred to by Saleem, the narrator: “there are many versions of India as Indians.” The latter’s attempt to reconcile his various multiple identities reflects India’s struggle to reunite its multiple divisions after the independence from British colonization. In a fully emotional passage, Saleem meditates on his country’s independence as a nation which had previously never existed [that] was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist, except by the efforts of a phenomenal will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream. ( Midnight’s Children 124) Like India, Saleem must reconcile the multiple identities which make up himself. He recognizes that “there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives, places, rumors” (4). The narrator-author Saleem is given voice through his attempts to write his story and the history of his country; the purpose behind his narrative is to offer the reader the opportunity to question narratives that we have come to accept as official and historical truths. Michel Foucault gives importance to the power and knowledge nexus in writing history and his emphasis on the role played by power leads to question which discourses have been privileged, and which histories have been told, in whose name, and for what purpose, if one takes into consideration that the writer always writes from a position of authority. Unlike traditional history, contemporary histories deal with the interrogation of the past from a marginal position, clearing up a place in the historical record for the suppressed and silent voices. In remapping the imaginary spaces of India, Rushdie’s novel redraws the literary as well as the political from a peripheral perspective, and the story of the protagonist is narrated by a native narrator, hence, giving voice to the multiple silenced voices by bringing them back from the periphery to the center and showing the other side of the medal. Rushdie’s rewriting of India’s recent past could not be considered as merely “writing back with vengeance,” but rather bridges the gap between the center and the periphery creating, thus, a continuum instead of a divide.

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While Kipling’s Kim is a late nineteenth century novel fully concerned with the mechanics of ruling an Empire, and eludes the conflicts between Indians and British, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children deconstructs and reconstructs India’s recent past by analyzing postcolonial issues such as identity, cultural formation, the loss of the self and the difficulty of assuming one’s historical past. Whereas Kipling’s novel is a political romance that hides British anxiety of the collapse of an overseas power, Rushdie’s novel is a post-independence version of Kipling’s Kim that responds to the dominant master discourses of imperial Europe. However, both Indian – English novels as well as their respective hyphenated writers, in their commitment to fantasy, reveal a hybrid identity to two nations, two spaces, India and England.

Works cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffins, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Kinkead-Weekes, Marks, and Gregor, Jan. William. William Golding: A Critical Study. London: Faber, 1975. Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1994. Mitra, Reena. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2006. Rege, Josna E. “Victim Into Protagonist.” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 342–75. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta, 1990. ———. Midnight’s Children. London: Picador, 1992. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Chatto, 1993. Shah, Bilel A. “Nation and Narration: A Study of Midnight’s Children.” Third Front: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (2013): 74–90. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

21 TEACHING NON-PLACES IN BRITISH CHILDREN’S FANTASY LITERATURE Hannah Swamidoss

Non-places in British Victorian and Edwardian children’s fantasy literature offer special opportunities to teach spatiality. The fantastical geographies of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906), and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) interact with contemporary concerns over science, religion, social injustice, social unrest, the urban, and the rural. With respect to the genre, Rosemary Jackson notes the subversive nature of all fantasy literature in expressing desire,1 and Maria Nikolajeva argues that issues surrounding power become the “engine” that drives children’s fantasy literature.2 The contours and details of these non-places, consequently, demonstrate where power resides and what it has to offer to those who enter these worlds. Additionally, the didactic intent of children’s literature – its tradition of inculcating moral, social, and political values in its audience – further complicates the portrayal of non-places. Students quickly understand that non-places not only express the desire for change in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, but they also address fundamental questions of how one should or should not live. In their respective reviews of studies in spatiality, Andrew Thacker3 and Robert Tally4 note the significance of Henri Lefebvre’s distinction of space and place and his discussion of social space. Whereas a range of approaches can be used to meaningfully analyze the spatiality of Kingsley’s water world, Lewis’s Wonderland, Nesbit’s time travelling border crossings, and Grahame’s rural animal world, I find that using the categories of space and place offer a broad framework to explore these geographies and meaningfully locate what holds agency and the values these texts promote. With respect to Nesbit, I find Tally’s discussion of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of nomads and border crossings in understanding Nesbit’s depiction of space useful.5 I also find that many critical readings of Kingsley, Carroll, Nesbit, and Grahame while not focused on the spatiality of their fantastical worlds offer insights into aspects of the narratives which can then be used to analyze the spatiality of these texts. These scholarly articles can be additional resources for students.

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Kingsley, Carroll, Nesbit, and Grahame’s narratives belong to the canon of children’s literature and could be used individually or together in various courses. Apart from undergraduate/graduate courses on children’s literature or fantasy literature, these books would fit in well with courses on science, religion, gender studies, the Victorian and/or Edwardian periods, and popular culture. While students could easily read one or more of these books in its entirety, selected passages would also work well to fit the needs of a course.

The Water-Babies Charles Kingsley’s varied interests – theology, Christian socialism, science – all find their way into The Water-Babies. An Anglican priest involved in the Chartist movement and an admirer of Charles Darwin, Kingsley addresses his theological and social concerns through his protagonist Tom, a chimney sweep. The narrative so closely intertwines geographical space with social space that the two become one, and geographical space often takes on the moral characteristics of the social aspects it hosts. Before he transforms into a water-baby, Tom, for instance, occupies the restricted and less desirable spaces available to the working class that represent hardship and create some moral flaws in him. In contrast, the spacious and varied non-places in which Tom resides when he becomes a water-baby counter the values of the human world that Tom leaves. These non-places welcome Tom and give him agency, for when he returns to the real world as an engineer, Tom moves upward in class and appropriates some of the space formerly denied to him. Yet, despite Kingsley’s social concern, elements of racial bias enter the narrative. The spatiality of the aqueous non-places and Tom’s own fantastical body as a water-baby, therefore, offer students different critically interesting ways of examining gender, class, and race. Students can quickly understand that the unpleasant spaces (whether social or physical) that Tom has permission to occupy as a chimney sweep belong to others, even the chimneys of buildings that Tom cleans. Tom’s inability to own property becomes strikingly clear when he takes the wrong turn among the flues of a wealthy squire’s house and enters the pristine bedroom of the squire’s daughter. The servants immediately think Tom has entered the room to steal, and the whole household chases him off the estate. In contrast, the non-places of stream, river, and ocean belong to the divine and offer a radically different form of social space. Interestingly, this divine ownership represents female agency since Kingsley portrays the Christian God-head in the form of three fairies whose values shape the aqueous world: the uncompromising Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, the gentle Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, and the rather reserved Mother Carey who creates creatures along the principles of evolution. The divine presence in these non-places disrupts and subverts human understandings of property and ownership and the greed, corruption, and bondage that can occur as in the case of Tom. The non-places of the narrative become a level playing field. This female agency and the association of patriarchy with societal ills and the negative forms of ownership such as Grimes, the master sweep’s, control of Tom offers students different elements to analyze and compare with other Victorian texts. Likewise, students will identify Kingsley’s

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inability to impose the values of the non-places to the land world when Tom returns to it as an engineer. While the narrative portrays elements of class mobility with Tom now having dinner with Ellie, the squire’s daughter, Tom rejoins the cycle of ownership even though he no longer suffers its ills. These elements offer multiple ways of analyzing spatiality within the text and the larger contexts with which these issues connect. Despite its inability to impose reform on the land world, the non-places of stream, river, and ocean offer superior values and change Tom into a new being. Kingsley’s description of the stream depicts it as a pleasant and rich space. In the water forests, for instance, the narrator notes, “There were water-flowers there too, in thousands; and Tom tried to pick them: but as soon as he touched them, they drew themselves in and turned into knots of jelly; and then Tom saw that they were all alive – bells, and stars, and wheels, and flowers, of all beautiful shapes and colours . . .”6 This attention to detail in the natural world and the vigor seen within it reflects Kingsley’s scientific belief; Larry Uffelman observes that Kingsley takes the position of vitalism within nature instead of materialism.7 Geographical space, consequently, invites exploration because of its intense richness, and Tom takes great pleasure in the knowledge he gains from interacting with the various creatures. This knowable aspect of geographical space in turn creates relationships when Tom makes friends with the creatures around him. Instead of exploration creating an imperial model of knowledge leading to conquest, the narrative portrays Tom becoming part of the social space. In doing so, Tom has some moral choices to make; he can choose to tease the animals or help them, and he has to decide whether he will be adventurous and, therefore, hardworking like the salmon which travel long distances and battle unfavorable conditions. Tom follows the example of the more industrious creatures, yet his old life as a sweep still has some influence on him when he begins to bully others or steals candy from the fairies. Tellingly, the fairies correct these moral flaws by helping Tom create positive relationships. This treatment of space and place against the context of imperialism proves interesting. On the one hand, the narrative rejects the idea of Tom conquering or gaining agency over the non-places, yet on the other hand, the ocean, the most international of the non-places, seems very British. This ambiguous rendering of oceanic space can help students see the complexities of the narrative’s depiction of spatiality. Whether or not the non-places have largely British animals and manners, one element that subverts the well-demarcated England that Tom leaves is that the non-places disrupt any notion of fixed space. When stream merges into river or river becomes sea, the boundaries between each constantly change. While the lack of borders again overturns the idea of ownership and property, it also disrupts the values of stability. These indeterminate spaces signify constant change and mobility and create endless potential and outcomes. The lack of boundaries and borders shifts the understanding of wealth from possessing material space or goods to the relational whether it signifies new geographical spaces or new friendships. The narrative’s portrayal of spatiality demonstrates aspects of Victorian optimism in the possibilities before Tom.

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Tom, himself, becomes one of the promising outcomes offered by the nonplaces, and his body becomes the site of spatial negotiations. In the land world, the soot from the chimneys blackens Tom’s skin, but more importantly, when Tom catches sight of himself in a mirror in the room that he has mistakenly entered, he sees himself as a “little black ape.”8 Later, when the squire finds Tom’s seemingly drowned body in the stream, the narrator states that “his whole husk and shell had been washed quite off him” and calls this husk a “sooty old shell.”9 In the water world, Tom, the white water-baby, evolves into a white, middle class adult. This understanding of the body as both physical and social space occurs again in the story of the Doasyoulikes who display none of the hardworking qualities valued in the non-places. The Doasyoulikes de-evolve from humans to apes, and the last one before being shot by a hunter tries to utter the abolitionist slogan, “Am I not a man and a brother?”10 Scholars such as Arthur Johnston, Amanda Hodgson, and Jessica Straley11 analyze various aspects of Kingsley’s evolutionary model, and offer valuable insights for students to add to their analysis of the body as a site of spatiality. The disruption of property and fixed space with the emphasis on the relational all open up the discourse on spatiality in children’s literature, especially with respect to gender and class. Kingsley’s portrayal of the white English citizen evolving into a mightier form and the inability of the non-places to influence the land world adds complexity to his discourse on space.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland In a manner similar to Kingsley, Carroll disrupts the notion of fixed space by having spaces merge, emerge, or disappear in his fantastical dream world of Wonderland. While Kingsley portrayed this subversion of fixed space as purposeful and exciting, Carroll depicts these rapid shifts as bewildering and frequently threatening. Instead of the Victorian optimism that Kingsley displays, Carroll’s fantastical world does not correct the ills of Victorian England, but instead magnifies contemporary fears. The shifting and varied spaces of Wonderland, consequently, reflect class anxiety and societal instability. Students can see that Wonderland disrupts geographic knowledge and the spatiality of the body. While the first questions human knowledge leading to control and stability, the second undermines human authority and identity. The disorder that arises from not knowing or being able to control physical space, whether it be one’s surroundings or body, leads to the degeneration of social spaces and the interactions that occurs within them. The spatiality of Wonderland often takes on nightmarish qualities.12 Unlike Tom whose entry into the water world occurs because of his desire to become clean, Alice’s impulsive interest in the White Rabbit makes her begin her journey into Wonderland. Initially, as Alice wanders through the rabbit hole, the spatiality of her new environs seems “mappable” and one that she can navigate. Carroll adds concrete details about her locale. Alice, for instance, first makes her way through a horizontal tunnel and then suddenly falls, albeit slowly, down a vertical, well-like tunnel, which has some maps, bookshelves, and cupboards on its sides. At

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the bottom of this tunnel, Alice finds another passageway and enters a hall full of locked doors. Yet Wonderland quickly subverts this knowable, navigable element of space by trapping and confining Alice or disorienting her as spaces vanish or rapidly shift and merge into each other. Wonderland denies Alice geographic knowledge and the stability that comes with such information. This destabilizing element of Wonderland affects Alice’s geographic knowledge of England; as she tries to gain mastery of herself and her surroundings, Alice tries to recite facts that she knows and states: “London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome . . .”13 Although Alice realizes she has made a mistake, she has no means to correct it. The futility of trying to impose spatial order in this fantastical world becomes quickly apparent. In addition to the impossibility of knowing or fixing space, Alice’s body defies her knowledge of the space of her own person as it rapidly changes sizes when she shrinks, becomes taller, or has an elongated neck.14 Unlike Tom’s new biological form which both delights and develops him, Alice’s changing body denies her easy access to Wonderland. Although Alice begins to gain control of this process when she takes advice from the caterpillar and breaks off pieces of a mushroom which when she eats gives her some measure of control over her changing size, she depends on these external factors. For instance, if Alice were to resist the forces of Wonderland and refuse to eat or drink anything which would change her size, she cannot escape this fantastical world in her “normal” body as there is no way up the rabbit hole for her. Likewise, the smaller Alice has access to different spaces in Wonderland, but that creates no additional agency for her and often places her into dangerous situations. The one time that Alice is much larger than the inhabitants of Wonderland and can fight them off, she has become too large to escape the house in which she has attained this size. Likewise, when Alice has an unusually elongated neck, her hands cannot reach her face. Don Rackin and Jan Gordon associate Alice’s mobile body being linked to questions of biological identity, particularly as various characters constantly ask to know what type of being Alice is.15 Instead of the optimism in science and evolution that Kingsley displays, Carroll’s text demonstrates anxiety and a fear of degeneration. The indeterminate nature of Alice’s body, after all, cannot be too far off from the fate of the Duchess’s baby which turns into a pig. The narrative further explores the anxieties created by space by portraying many of the social spaces that Alice finds herself in as unpleasant. The Duchess’s house subverts the normal upper-class home; the front door of the house leads directly into a smoke-filled kitchen in which the servant vents her anger on her mistress and others by throwing pots and pans at them. Alice’s body also betrays the middle-class female subject when the White Rabbit mistakes her for his servant and sends her on an errand to his home. In the role of a servant, Alice, as mentioned earlier, begins to grow larger inside the house and represents barely contained class anger. Even when Alice finally enters the garden that she has desired to see at the beginning of the narrative, she meets the capricious Queen of Hearts. The various spaces build on the instability of the individual subject and the unknowable element of one’s environment to represent class unrest or degeneration. Students can easily place

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these anxieties with contemporary political concerns such as working-class agitations and contested colonial space. The destabilization of geographic knowledge and the uncontrollability of the human form (and therefore human identity) emphasize the futility of societal stability and the impossibility of containing class unrest or degeneration. Wonderland’s spatiality points to a nightmarish understanding of human endeavors.

The Story of the Amulet Like Kingsley and Carroll, Nesbit also plays with the idea of fixed space and subverts it, rather explosively, when her four child protagonists time travel to ancient times as well as London of the future. Although some of their destinations represent historical places such as Ancient Egypt or Babylon, these places have the same characteristics as the more fantastical Atlantis and London of the future. While Kingsley subverted space to achieve moral cleanliness and Carroll to emphasize the fragility of social order, Nesbit problematizes the loss of domestic space and uses the disruption of national borders to recover the family; Deleuze’s theorizing of global nomads, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization prove particularly interesting in the context of domestic space.16 The narrative connects spatiality solely with the family; for instance, the children’s border crossings occur to restore their own family, and frequently, when they access the social spaces of other nations, the four siblings see families at risk or being formed. The text, consequently, juxtaposes the urban spatiality of 1905 London, the children’s present, to the loss and recovery of domestic space. Unlike Carroll’s deep-rooted anxieties over class unrest, Nesbit’s Fabian beliefs offer a resolution to the hardships the working class experiences while maintaining the stability of the middle class. Students will find that Nesbit adds an interesting dimension on gender and the Victorian understanding of separate spheres.17 In structuring the tale’s border crossings, Nesbit uses the geographical and social space of London to represent commerce, societal ills, and the disruption of the nuclear family. At the outset of the narrative, the children make their way from Fitzroy street to St. James’s Park through a commercial area, and the narrator points out the allure of these stores by directly addressing the reader: “you will pass a great many shops that you cannot possibly help stopping to look at.”18 Yet, it quickly becomes clear that the shopkeepers do not know how to rightly value their merchandise when they cage birds and cats and cannot see the true value of a magical animal, the Psammead, or an equally magical if unprepossessing amulet. The shopkeepers express crass materialism and craftiness as they try to get the best bargain for their wares; the geographical spaces of the city take on the characteristics of the social interactions that occur within them. This calculating nature of mercantile spaces of the city reflects the monetary needs which disrupt the children’s family in the first place. The father has to work and takes a reporting assignment in Manchuria, and the family cannot afford to have everyone stay together when the mother needs to go to Madeira to recover from illness. The children, themselves, on their first foray into the city try to “do the heaps of things . . . in London without

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paying for them.”19 In contrast to the merchants, however, the children will not let their old friend the Psammead (even though he will no longer give the children any magical wishes benefiting them) waste away in the store and willingly give all the money they have to rescue him. The children’s values counter the morals of the metropolis and sent them on their border crossings to restore their family, for the rescued Psammead tells them that if the children can find the other half of the amulet in the past, then the magical object will grant them their heart’s desire – the restoration of their family. In contrasting London to the fantastical places that the children visit in the past, the narrative continues to portray geographical and social spaces in terms of the family. On their first border crossing to Ancient Egypt, for instance, the children see a village overrun by an invading foreign power; the invaders immediately seek out and take possession of the amulet. The invaders have similar characteristics to the negative moral values represented by London; the text emphasizes that the man who takes the amulet looks like the merchant who sold them the amulet in London.20 The invaders have no concern for the people and families they destroy; the narrative portrays that any imperial power, however mistaken, values territory and wealth over people. Yet the ancient cultures are less oppressive than Edwardian London. The children, for instance, visit Babylon and barely escape with their lives. Nonetheless, the Babylonians understand the worth of individuals more than civilized England. When the Queen of Babylon visits the children in London (the modern Babylon), she compares the working class to slaves and comments: “But how badly you keep your slaves. How wretched and poor and neglected they seem.”21 Likewise, when the children try to help an orphaned girl in London so that she would not have to enter the work house, they have to travel back to Britain in 55 b.c. where the child immediately finds a home. The Psammead tells the children: “You don’t suppose anyone would want a child like that in YOUR times – in YOUR towns? . . . You’ve got your country into such a mess that there’s no room for half your children – and no one to want them.”22 Even though Caesar is about to invade England, the child still has a better life in this time period. London needs to learn from Babylon and Ancient Britain in understanding that true worth lies in people and not the amassing of wealth. To help correct the misguided social spaces of London, the narrative offers a glimpse of London of the future. Nesbit emphasizes how child friendly and family oriented this London is. A child invites the time travelers home, and the Edwardian children show amazement that they would immediately be welcomed by an unknown family. The house in future London also demonstrates the value people place on children. Any room, in which a child might enter, for instance, has padded surfaces to prevent injuries. This London has not done away with technology, but has used it to improve the safety and quality of life for its residents: fires to warm homes have become outdated, cars have replaced horses and taken care of pollution on the streets, and the Thames now runs clean. The class system has also been upended; the nice house that the children have entered belongs to a welleducated carpenter. London of the future rightly understands spatiality and has

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reconfigured its geographical and social spaces. Although students will see that a successful deterritorialization of London through the children’s time travel might not have occurred, Nesbit makes a strong attempt to reterritorialize London along Fabian principles. Nesbit’s global nomads offer countercultural values of the family as they oppose the dominant values of urban space or empire over the ages.

The Wind in the Willows In contrast to Kingsley, Carroll, and Nesbit, Grahame sees no value in disrupting the fixed nature of space or in border crossings; The Wind in the Willows places emphasis on the fixed and known spatiality of the immediate countryside that an individual can access. While the narrative celebrates the countryside and the natural world, it offers a very different perspective than Kingsley’s natural world on what types of social spaces hold value. Instead of the industrious creatures seen in The Water-Babies, Grahame’s countryside offers the pleasures of leisure. Whereas the text has some elements of a lifestyle slipping away indicating loss, Grahame’s story holds none of the deep anxieties seen in Carroll. Instead of the emphasis Nesbit places on deep contentment arising from the nuclear heterosexual family, Grahame presents a homosocial group of animals wherein contentment lies in the bonds of male friendship. The different locales in the narrative not only reflect clear demarcations in class, but also engendered spaces that represent male pleasure. Students can easily identify proto-Modernist concerns of mechanization creeping into the countryside and the element of nostalgia which permeates the text. The most heightened moment of experiencing spatiality in the narrative occurs when two of the main characters, Mole and Rat, go in search of a lost otter cub, and they find the content cub asleep at the feet of Pan. Grahame’s description of Mole and Rat’s approach to the island includes a detailed description of the countryside that has no evidence of human interference. More importantly, this space has a mystical element to it: as Pan pipes on his flute, his music draws the animals to him. Rat, the poet more attuned to the spiritual, can hear the music first, but the music eventually has the same majestic impact on Mole. The animals find the source of the music on an island which Grahame describes as: “Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen.”23 The ultimate experience of nature includes an appreciation of every detail in a particular locale, and in those rare moments, this knowledge can lead to an intense spiritual understanding. These moments, however, also reveal loss; when Pan leaves, Mole and Rat feel bereaved, and the otter cub wakes up and runs around in sorrow. As a means of comforting them and preventing madness, Pan casts a spell of forgetfulness. The impossibility of having sustained moments of this quality indicates loss at various levels, an element of modern life that must be endured. Setting aside an elemental loss that all the creatures endure, the countryside can offer many pleasures, but not all regions of the land offer the same quality of experience.24 When Rat befriends Mole, Rat makes it clear that exploring their immediate

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surroundings but steering away from the Wild Wood and the Wide World will offer Mole the most agency and enjoyable form of existence. The text’s emphasis on the local becomes clear throughout the plot. Toad, for instance, invites Mole and Rat to join him in his caravan, and while the animals take in the beauties of their new surroundings, Rat – the moral compass of this episode – has a deep longing for the familiar spaces of home. Later on in the narrative, when Rat (after having met the mesmerizing Sea Rat) loses his bearings and decides to experience the Wide World, Mole comes to the aid of his friend and reorients him to the valuable pleasures of their local environs. Toad’s fascination with motorcars best represents the problems of not finding value in an appropriately demarcated space. The speed of the motorcar and the broad swathes of space that it covers reject the intimate knowable nature of space which comes with slower explorations taken on foot or boat. Yet the narrative introduces another restrictive factor in that space and social class can shape or limit the type of leisure the characters can experience. At the outset of the story, for instance, Mole busily cleans his home. The small enclosed space of Mole’s home along with the burdensome task of keeping it clean imposes restricting limits on Mole’s experience. When he breaks free of his home, Mole embarks on a life that understands true value lies not in duty but leisure. The text’s emphasis on leisure becomes clear when Mole derides the creatures that go about their daily routines and then meets Rat, the ultimate guide to “messing about in boats.”25 Although Mole will revisit his home later in the narrative with Rat and have a Dickensian Christmas celebration with his neighbors, he clearly recognizes the limits of this space. While Mole can move from a limited to a much more expansive space, the narrative shows that this movement depends on social class. Unlike the working class stoats, ferrets, and weasels which need to remain in the Wild Wood, the lower middle class Mole has more access to the riverbank and the surrounding countryside. Yet class adds further nuances to space. The wealthy Toad and respected and squire-like Badger have others do work for them while they enjoy the pleasures of the countryside. Once Mole begins to live with Rat, Mole often does tasks for Rat and the others. The text makes clear that one’s social class determines the agency and extent one has over space and leisure. In addition to class structuring space, gender plays a role in appreciating and appropriating space. The all male central characters of Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger enjoy the pleasures of life found in nature and leisure either through fellow male companions or in solitude. Toad interacts with two human female characters, the jailor’s daughter and the barge-woman. The story makes clear that Toads interactions with these women occur because of his transgressive act of placing value in the motorcar’s rapid movement across space instead of appreciating the intimate understanding of local space. While the narrative portrays the jailor’s daughter in a positive light, she still represents the ultimate restriction of space – the prison cell. The jailor’s daughter also forces Toad to take on the dress and persona of a washerwoman so that he can escape the prison. The disguised Toad’s encounter with the barge-woman occurs when she invites him onto the barge, but Toad can take no pleasure from the countryside or canal as the woman makes him wash some clothes.

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While the space of the jail or canal does not necessarily represent the feminine, the feminine, particularly in the case of the barge-woman or the disguised Toad, can ruin any pleasure that space can offer. Toad reappropriates space and class when he once more becomes the master of Toad Hall. The pleasures of space and the enjoyment of the well-defined local space belong to the male middle-class subject. Apart from demarcating space along the values of pleasure, Grahame also restricts access to the places with the most agency.

Conclusion Using Kingsley, Carroll, Nesbit, and Grahame to teach spatiality demonstrates the range of issues each text raises. Kingsley subverts human understandings of ownership and the values of well-demarcated space through a divine, female agency. Although race remains uncontested in his narrative and the values of Kingsley’s fantastical world seem limited to their confines, The Water-Babies structures spatiality in critically interesting ways. Carroll, on the other hand, uses spatiality to disrupt the known world at all levels to reveal a level of instability and chaos that threatens humanity; while he confines Wonderland to dreams, the text suggests that it may not remain within these restraints. Nesbit’s treatment of border crossings approaches spatiality from the context of maintaining domestic space and embracing Fabian principles. In contrast to the three fantastical worlds that come before his, Grahame structures a well-defined world in which its denizens must know their place in order to gain the most from geographical and social space. Certain members of society are privileged over others in enjoying the leisure and pleasure of space. Whether read independently or together, these texts offer much in the teaching of spatiality.

Notes 1 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 3–5. 2 Maria Nikolajeva, “The Development of Children’s Fantasy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, eds. Edwards James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 51. 3 Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 16–22. 4 Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 116–119. 5 Ibid., 135–140. 6 Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1976), 103. 7 Larry K. Uffelman, Charles Kingsley (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 78–81. 8 Kingsley, The Water-Babies, 31. 9 Ibid., 89. 10 Ibid., 267. 11 Arthur Johnston, “The Water-Babies: Kingsley’s Debt to Darwin,” English: The Journal of the English Association 12, no. 72 (Autumn 1959): 215–219; Amanda Hodgson, “Defining the Species: Apes, Savages, and Humans in Scientific and Literary Writing in the 1860s,” Journal of Victorian Culture 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1999): 228–252; Jessica Straley, “Of Beasts and Boys: Kingsley, Spenser, and the Theory of Recapitulation,” Victorian Studies 49.4 (Summer 2007): 583–609.

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12 Nina Auerbach observes: “the dainty child carries the threatening kingdom of Wonderland within her.” Nina Auerbach, “Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child,” in Lewis Carroll: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Printers), 32. 13 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Boston: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1992), 20. 14 Katherine Walls observes that popular readings of Alice’s shifting size have noted a Darwinian influence on the text, but with respect to Alice’s elongated neck, Walls also sees the influence of William Paley’s Natural Theology which makes an argument for design and the existence of God. Katherine Walls, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and William Paley’s Natural Theology,” Notes and Queries 64.1 (March 2017), 133–135. 15 Donald Rackin, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning (New York: Twayne, 1991), 94; Jan Gordon, “The Alice Books and the Metaphors of Victorian Childhood,” in Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as Seen Through the Critics’ Looking-Glasses, 1865–1971, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Vintage, 1977), 93–113. 16 Tally, 135–140. 17 Michelle Smith argues that Nesbit “. . . reconfigures the heroic to situate maternal relations within it . . .” Michelle Smith, “E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: Reconfiguring Time, Nation, and Gender,” Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 52, no. 3 (2009): 298. 18 E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library, 2007), 13. 19 Ibid., 12. 20 Eitan Bar-Yosef convincingly reads this incident and others in the text as displaying antiSemitism. Eitan Bar-Yosef, “E. Nesbit and the Fantasy of Reverse Colonization: How Many Miles to Modern Babylon?” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 46, no. 1 (2003): 5–28. 21 Ibid., 133. 22 Ibid., 165. 23 Kenneth Grahame, “The Wind in the Willows,” in Seven of the Best (London: CRW Publishing Ltd., 2007), 374. 24 Lois Kuznets maps out the topography of the novel according to the principle of Topophilia which she takes from Gaston Bachelard. Lois R. Kuznets, “Toad Hall Revisited,” Children’s Literature 7 (1978): 115–128. 25 Grahame, “The Wind in the Willows,” 342.

22 KEY CONCEPTS AND THE THRILLER Space, place, and mapping Ralph Crane, Lisa Fletcher, and Elizabeth Leane

Introduction: popular genre fiction and spatiality Phil Hubbard begins his entry “Space/Place” in Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Ideas with an important disclaimer: individually and as a pair, these terms present a seemingly intractable problem for anyone who seeks to define them. “Though the concepts of space and place may appear self-explanatory,” he states, “they have been (and remain) two of the most diffuse, ill-defined and inchoate concepts in the social sciences and humanities” (41). The fuzziness of these geocritical watchwords comes, as Tim Cresswell explains, from the pairing of place, “a word wrapped in common sense,” with the “more abstract concept” of space (8, 1). From the perspective of learning and teaching in spatial literary studies, this conceptual imprecision need not make space/place into a “loose, baggy monster” in the classroom. Rather, it provides the opportunity to introduce students to the rough-and-tumble (and the fun) of tackling the conceptual difficulties at the heart of the so-called “spatial turn” in contemporary literary studies. This chapter draws on current research, as well as our teaching experience at the University of Tasmania to suggest one approach to sparking independent critical thinking about space and place in literary studies. In broad terms, it argues that the best way to provide students with a strong theoretical framework, and an associated critical lexicon, is not simply to gift them a glossary prepared in advance, but to invite them to test the value and relevance of selected terms through applied learning tasks. Most scholarship about the relations between space, place, and literature focuses on “high” literature, especially literary fiction, literary non-fiction, and poetry. But this research tradition need not guide our selection of teaching texts. The teaching case study offered in this chapter comes from Popular Genres, an intermediate/ upper level undergraduate course at the University of Tasmania, which is delivered through a mixture of large lectures (100+ students) and smaller tutorials (20

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students). The unit provides students with the opportunity to think critically about the significance of space/place in some of the major genres in Western culture: romance; fantasy; and thrillers. Here, we focus on the thriller, outlining the approaches and activities we employ to encourage students to explore key concepts in spatial literary studies by applying them to selected texts.

Case study: teaching Ian Fleming’s Dr No and Clive Cussler’s Dragon In Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, Ken Gelder suggests that the thriller may be “popular fiction at its purest, soliciting the reader’s belief as it unfolds and using its sheer pace to carry that belief along intact” (49). More than any other genre, the thriller encourages the reader to turn the page and find out what happens. Identifying the essential ingredients of the thriller, Jerry Palmer considers plot to be central: “The plot – the story – is the process by which the hero averts the conspiracy, and this process is what provides the thrills that the reader seeks” (53). But what happens in the thriller can never be separated from where it happens (see Leane 26). Tzvetan Todorov’s seminal analysis of the thriller hints at this when he notes the genre’s “tendency toward the marvelous and the exotic, which brings it closer on the one hand to the travel narrative, and on the other to contemporary science fiction” (48). Todorov’s observation is truer, however, of the adventure thriller or spy thriller than (say) the psychological or legal thriller. Thrillers can be set anywhere: in crowded cities; in suburban houses; in remote rural locations; on planes, trains, buses and spacecraft; in dense jungles, or in sparsely populated deserts; on land or on the high seas. Frequently they traverse a combination of these settings. But this flexibility does not suggest that setting is irrelevant to plot – quite the opposite. Within the thriller genre, different settings enable and constrain certain kinds of stories. Thrillers can enable undergraduate students to think through key terms in the critical lexicon of spatial literary studies in useful ways. Approaching space and place through the thriller requires students to slow down the pace at which they might normally read in order to think about the ways in which action and character are intrinsically tied to space and place. Yet the very pace that the adventure thriller promises its reader makes these novels excellent teaching texts, particularly for an interdisciplinary group of students or one in which the level of literary critical training is limited. The fast pace of the thriller is produced (among other things) by language that refuses to draw attention to itself, as any opaqueness of expression would form an obstacle to the rapid flow of the narrative. The thriller’s very readability thus means that students unaccustomed to thinking spatially about texts can do so in the first instance without the distraction of difficult or dense language. The conventions that define genres of popular fiction mean the spatiality of the thriller is best taught through two or more examples, rather than a single text. There are almost endless possibilities, but here we focus on novels by two very prominent thriller writers that have been very well received by our second- and third-year

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students: Ian Fleming’s spy thriller Dr. No (1958) and Clive Cussler’s adventure thriller Dragon (1990). When selecting a pair of genre novels for teaching spatial concepts in the course, we chose texts that share common ground. Reading through Dr. No and Dragon for the first time, anyone will note the similarity of their plots and island settings (discussed in more detail below), making the novels a productive pair for teaching spatial ideas. Many students will know the character of James Bond, if only through the numerous (and sometimes very loose) film adaptations. Teaching Dr. No, the sixth of Fleming’s fourteen books featuring the British secret agent, thus requires redirecting attention to words on the page rather than accumulated memories from more recent films. A useful first exercise is to require students to list all the locations where action occurs in Dr. No, as well as those that are mentioned but never depicted. This is an effective tutorial activity to encourage students to focus on the functions of spatial settings in any text, and is a stepping stone towards deeper conceptual thinking about space and place, and then to more sophisticated and spatially nuanced analyses of the text under discussion. In our teaching, we frequently use a settingfocused “Word Clouds” activity, which involves students working together to list all the locations in the novel on the whiteboard and sorting them into categories (see Fletcher and Richardson), but the exercise can also be set as class preparation. When students have generated a list of locations – individually or together – and considered the similarities and differences between them, we offer the class a set of classificatory terms for setting and ask them to reorganize their list under subheadings. We use Marie-Laure Ryan’s definitions of “spatial frame,” “setting,” “story space,” and “narrative (or story) world” as they are readily accessible and clear, but instructors could choose their own sources and adapt accordingly. Following Ryan’s definitions, students will begin to discuss – and hopefully debate – the spatial dimensions of Bond’s famous thriller: “setting,” primarily post-war London, Jamaica, Crab Key; “spatial frames,” such as bedrooms or beaches; “story space,” which would include, for example, Antwerp, where a guano tanker that Bond sees has come from, or Miami, where Honeychile Rider, his love interest, sends her shells to a collector; and “story world,” which would incorporate students’ knowledge of the geopolitical relations between the UK, US, and Russia at the time. This introduction to thinking about narrative spaces and places encourages students to appreciate that settings, in their broadest sense, produce and are produced by narrative action. The next step is to ask students to look more closely at the specific functions of a particular type of location. Our lectures on Dr. No focus on its island settings. Tutorial discussions and assessment tasks invite students to follow (and hopefully build on) the models we provide for their own analyses of settings in the thriller (e.g. the airport or airplane, the ocean or ship) or in the other genres in the course (e.g. the road or the woods in fantasy fiction, the small town or the bedroom in romance). Islands are an excellent starting point for introducing spatial literary studies through popular fiction because of their ubiquity across all the major genres, from the countless holiday islands of contemporary romance to the world-embracing

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archipelagos of epic fantasy fiction (see Crane and Fletcher, Island Genres). Islands have long been favored settings for thriller writers because (among other things) of their ability to isolate the hero, who must rely on his or her own resources rather than any kind of organized back-up – thus providing the self-reliance that Palmer identifies as a hallmark of the thriller hero (15, 29). Throughout Dr. No Fleming emphasizes the bounded nature of his two island settings: Jamaica and the nearby small island of Crab Key. He uses Bond’s arrival in Jamaica by air early in the novel as an opportunity to provide a description – a “narrative map” – of the island: Bond watched the big green turtle-backed island grow on the horizon and the water below him turn from the dark blue of the Cuba Deep to the azure and milk of the inshore shoals. Then they were over the North Shore, over its rash of millionaire hotels, and crossing the high mountains of the interior. The scattered dice of small-holdings showed on the slopes and in clearings in the jungle, and the setting sun flashed gold on the bright worms of tumbling rivers and streams. (44) Similarly, Fleming charts Crab Key for the reader as Bond pores over an Ordnance Survey map of the island: The overall area of the island was about fifty square miles. Three-quarters of this, to the east, was swamp and shallow lake. From the lake a flat river meandered down to the sea and came out halfway along the south coast into a small sandy bay. [. . .] To the west, the island rose steeply to a hill stated to be five hundred feet high and ended abruptly with what appeared to be a sheer drop to the sea. (82) A close reading of this cartographic scene offers an ideal opportunity to introduce the terms “space” and “place,” without locking them down. In our experience, students are often confused by Yi-Fu Tuan’s oft-cited statement on the relationship between space and place: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). James Bond has helped us to unpack this important quotation for students, inviting them to think about how best to interpret and apply it. As Bond studies the map in the Jamaica Institute and “marks the boundaries of the island with his gaze” (82), he establishes a “human relation” (Prieto xx) with the island. Before he reads the map, Crab Key is an abstract concept, a generic island site with which he is unfamiliar, located in the (for Bond) undifferentiated space of the ocean. But as he familiarizes himself with the contours of the island and endows it with value through metaphor, the site is given meaning and becomes place: “There was no sign of a road, or even a track on the island, and no sign of a house. The relief map showed that the island

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looked rather like a swimming water rat – a flat spine rising sharply to the head – heading west” (82). That the island is also seen as “a bad luck place” (55), a secretive, fortress-like place that no one ever leaves provides an opportunity to propose that “the baseline terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ are inadequate conceptual tools” for thinking about real or imagined geographies, be they islands, caves, or any other setting incompatible with human life (Crane and Fletcher, “Caves as Anti-Places”). With the aim of inspiring students to approach key concepts creatively and critically, we challenge students to test the usefulness of the notion of “anti-place,” which two of us coined to signal mapped sites that remain abstract or inhospitable to humans. Creating a learning environment in which students feel welcome and comfortable to take an interrogative perspective on key concepts is both a challenge and a responsibility. Adding a concept – “anti-place” – that we are still debating and testing and, importantly, which students will not find in dictionaries or textbooks, has proved an effective strategy for sparking productive debate. Other more established key terms that might be introduced in this way, depending on the texts being taught, include “non-place,” “chronotope,” or “third space.” We ask students to evaluate our argument that in Fleming’s novel Crab Key is an anti-place. This is emphasized through a series of negative descriptors as Bond and Quarrel approach the island by boat: Soon there was a thickening of the darkness ahead. The low shadow slowly took on the shape of a huge swimming rat. A pale moon rose slowly behind them. Now the island showed distinctly, a couple of miles away, and there was the distant grumble of surf. (108) The land is shadowy and shaped like a rat, the moon is pale, and the surf which encapsulates it grumbles. Seen from the sea, the island is no longer undifferentiated space, but neither is it a place in Tuan’s sense, as Bond’s experiences there will later reinforce. Anti-place is a useful term to highlight the imprecision of the terms space and place. Here it can be employed to emphasize the opposition between Crab Key and Jamaica, and the way that the description of Crab Key is antithetical to conventional tourist-brochure descriptions of islands and everyday life. Fleming uses the island as the central space around which the plot of Dr. No revolves, the space to which all the major characters are drawn, and the space where the thrilling climax is played out, emphasizing the importance of setting as well as character in thrillers. Clive Cussler’s tenth Dirk Pitt novel, Dragon, resonates with allusions to Fleming’s Dr. No. Cussler’s hero is clearly cast in the mold of James Bond. Similarly, the villain of the novel, Hideki Suma, is typical of the villains we encounter in Fleming’s 007 series, and behind him there is an evil cartel that mirrors the organizations such as SMERSH and SPECTRE created by Fleming. Cussler also draws on Fleming for several plot details: most obviously, Pitt’s luxury prison resembles the one Bond finds himself occupying in Dr. No; and the endurance test Dr. No sets Bond is mirrored

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in Kamatori’s manhunt of Pitt (and like Bond, Pitt steals some items that help him in his ordeal). Moreover, towards the end of Dragon Cussler presents readers with a premature obituary for Pitt, as Fleming had previously done for Bond at the end of You Only Live Twice. Most significantly in this context, Cussler also borrows Dr. No’s island setting – unsurprisingly, given that many of the Dirk Pitt novels are set on or around islands due to the dominance of the marine environment in the series. In Dragon, this is Soseki Island off Japan. Students could repeat the exercise applied to Dr. No, identifying setting, spatial frames, and story world, charting similarities and differences, and researching the specific geopolitics of late twentieth-century US-Japanese relations that provide context for Cussler’s thriller. One difference between Dr. No and Dragon is the latter’s inclusion of maps as paratexts. This offers the opportunity to discuss the difference between the narrative maps provided in Dr. No and what Sally Bushell terms a “literary map”: “a graphic representation of spatial relations among places or objects (real or imagined) that is presented alongside the literary work at the time of first publication and is authorial or authorially approved” (149). In other words, it is something that the author sees as an integral part of the text. Bushell suggests that there are three core questions that need to be asked when interpreting literary maps: “What does the map add to the text? What does the reading of the map do to the reading of the text, and vice versa? What might the map reveal about the text, or the text about the map?” (153). These questions are excellent prompts for thinking and learning in the spatial literary studies classroom. We use them to frame a discussion of the three maps in Dragon. The initial literary map located at the beginning of the novel shows key island sites from the historical prologue set in 1945, which incorporates real geography from the Aleutian Islands archipelago to Okinawa. This map provides the reader with a clear impression of the geography of the first section of the novel before the narrative itself commences, highlighting the connections between geography and literature that are evident across the genre as a whole. A second map, which zooms in from the scale of the first, signals the principal setting for the action late in the novel – Soseki Island – and links this setting back to the 1945 story by locating the wreckage of a plane, “Dennings’ B29,” on the map. A third “map” – a pair of cross-section diagrams – zooms in still further, to the fictional Edo City and the adjacent Soseki Island (both marked on the second map). These diagrams clearly emphasize the spatiality of Suma’s island headquarters and reinforce the difficulty of the task facing Pitt and his colleagues as they race to save the world from Suma’s dastardly plans, while also providing readers with a degree of geographical and topographical specificity that assists them to follow the movements of Pitt and company once they enter Suma’s island fortress. The island locations revealed in the various maps – narrative or literary – in Dr. No and Dragon signal the importance of bounded spaces or environments in these novels. By choosing these spaces both Fleming and Cussler put limits on the possible interactions of the hero and villain, as well as the nature of events. In other words, spatial setting is a key factor that determines the nature of events in thrillers.

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Conclusion One of the main challenges for teaching spatial literary studies is the imprecision of the key terms. This chapter argues that thrillers are perfect vehicles for encouraging students to think critically about the cornerstone concepts of space and place, and for examining the narrative significance of distinctive environments and landscapes in fiction. Drawing on our teaching of Fleming’s Dr. No and Cussler’s Dragon, we demonstrate some of the ways popular fiction can generate opportunities for thinking about actual and imaginary geographies and the critical lexicon of spatial/literary studies. Our case study in this chapter has focused on two thrillers which feature islands, but the approach it models would work just as well for other thrillers, such as Nevada Barr’s Blind Descent and Clive Cussler’s Inca Gold, which both have subterranean settings. Indeed, it could be applied to many combinations of popular genre and specific settings: fantasy fiction and the woods (Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood and Raymond E. Feist’s Faerie Tale) or popular romance and small towns (Robyn Carr’s Virgin River and Jill Shalvis’s Head over Heels). As “mapping machines” (Fletcher, Introduction 3), popular genres are a largely untapped resource for helping students to build their critical vocabulary, adding to their analytical tool-box for spatially oriented textual analysis.

Works cited Barr, Nevada. Blind Descent. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009 (first published in 1998). Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott. Bond and Beyond: The Popular Career of a Popular Hero. Macmillan, 1987. Bushell, Sally. “The Slipperiness of Literary Maps: Critical Geography and Literary Cartography.” Cartographica 47, no. 3 (2012): 149–160. Carr, Robyn. Virgin River. Harlequin, 2007. Crane, Ralph, and Lisa Fletcher. “Caves as Anti-Places: Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God.” Reconstruction 14, no. 3 (2014), accessed 15 March 2017, http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/143/CraneFletcher.shtml. ———. “Cave Genres/Genre Caves: Reading the Subterranean Thriller.” In Fletcher ed., Popular Fiction and Spatiality, pp. 9–24. ———. Island Genres, Genre Islands: Conceptualisation and Representation in Popular Fiction. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004. Cussler, Clive. Dragon. 1990. New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2006. ———. Inca Gold. 1994. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2005. Feist, Raymond E. Faerie Tale. 1988. New York, NY: Harper Voyager, 2001. Fleming, Ian. Dr. No. 1958. Vintage, 2012. Fletcher, Lisa. “Introduction.” In Fletcher ed., Popular Fiction and Spatiality, pp. 1–8. ———, ed. Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Fletcher, Lisa, and Joanna Richardson. “Word Clouds.” In The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom, ed., Diana Fuss and William A. Gleason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 251–253.

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Gelder, Ken. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. London, UK: Routledge, 2004. Holdstock, Robert. Mythago Wood. London, UK: Gollancz, 1984. Hubbard, Phil. “Space/Place.” In Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Ideas, ed., David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, David Atkinson, and Neil Washbourne. London, UK: I. B. Tauris, 2005, pp. 41–48. Leane, Elizabeth. “Unstable Places and Generic Spaces: Thrillers Set in Antarctica.” In Fletcher, ed., Popular Fiction and Spatiality, pp. 25–43. Palmer, Jerry. Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London, UK: Edward Arnold, 1978. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Space.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed., Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. Hamburg University Press, 7 March 2017, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/space. Shalvis, Jill. Head Over Heels. 2011. London, UK: Headline, 2014. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” In The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1977, pp. 42–52.

INDEX

adventure thriller 220–225 African Americans and ethnic American literature 190–198 Ahadou, Mikael 138 Akinshegun, Riua 138 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) 208–209, 211–213 Alliterative Revival 186–187 American literature: ethnic 190–198; women and geography in 141–148 American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context (Rico and Mano) 191 American Tragedy (Dreiser) 126 “An Abandoned Factory, Detroit” (Levine) 124–125 Ánansi Writers Workshop 132, 138–139 Anderson, Benedict 51, 70, 73, 142 Anderson, Jon 18 Anderson, Marin 146 Anderson, Regina 146 anti-place 223 Anzaldúa, Gloria 31, 54, 183 Aragon, Louis 104 ArcGIS 42, 45 “Architectural Uncanny, The” (Vidler) architecture: landscape 18; literature 36–37; 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 13–14 Architecture of the City, The (Rossi) 37 Arias, Claudia M. Milian 192 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne) 178 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 58, 61–67 Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (Moretti) 70, 72 atopia 19

Baca, Judy 136 Bachelard, Gaston 163, 173 Backman, Elias 150 Ball Jar, The (Plath) 89–90 Baltard, Victor 105 Bande de filles (film) 106 Barr, Nevada 225 Barry, Peter 1 Barthes, Roland 91, 93, 100 Baudelaire, Charles 94–95 Baudu, Denise 104 Being 16–17, 19 Belly of Paris (Zola) 102, 105 Benjamin, Walter 94–95, 104 Bentley, D. M. R. Berman, Marshall 173–174, 176 Bhabha, Homi 181–182 Bird, Dùnlaith 152 Blair, Sara 45 Blind Descent (Barr) 225 Blood, Fanny 151 Bloom, Harold 201 Boehrer, Bruce 62 Boethius 186 Bogue, Ronald 24 Bohls, Elizabeth A. 152 Bonner, Marita 147 borderland, medieval English literature and 181–188 Bottà, Giacomo 90 Bottled Devil, The (Lesage) 91 Boucicaut, Aristide 103 Boyd, Melba Joyce 129 Boyer, Christine 37

228

Index

Brand, Dana 94 Breton, André 104 British children’s fantasy literature 208–217 Brontë, Charlotte 70 Brown, Denise Scott 37 Brown, Frannie Carol 137 Brown, Tom 113 Bruce, Mark P. 186 Bruckner, Lynne 67 Bruner, Jerome 161 Buchanan, Ian 25–26 Buchanan, Shondra 138 Buchholz, Robert 114 Bulgakov, Mikhail 91 Bulson, Eric 43 Burke, Edmund 155 Burney, Frances 113, 117 Burwell, Adam Hood 78–79, 83 Bushell, Sally 224 Buzzard, James 152 Calderon, Paul 138 California Literature (course) 132 Callaloo (journal) 192 Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris, The (ed. Milne) 100 Canadian literature, teaching in Treaty 6 territory 77–84 Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (Moss and Sugars) 78 capitalism 36, 51, 53–54, 56, 103, 121, 123, 128 Capitalists and Conquerors (McLaren) 55 Carr, Robyn 225 Carroll, Lewis 208–209, 211–213 cartography see literary cartography Castro, Fidel 54 Caucasia (Senna) 191–194 Ceremony (Silko) 198 Chafets, Ze’ev 121, 127 Challenge (magazine) 146 Chaucer 186–188 Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of the Revolution (McLaren) 51 children’s fantasy literature, British 208–217 Christian allegory 187 chronotope 223 Chtcheglove, Ivan 104 Cisneros, Sandra 198 Citizen: An American Lyric (Rankine) 54 “City in American Life, The” (Schlesinger) 35 City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (Davis) 54 city walker 90–91, 94–97, 104, 117

Clarke, Arthur C. 13 class: teaching literary cartographies of 50, 54–55; in The Wind in the Willows (Grahame) 216–217 classroom: mapping multiethnic texts in literary classroom 40–48; nomadic 23–29 Clifford, James 154 close reading 7, 55, 135–136, 138–139, 142, 148, 222 cluster approach to literary study 143–148 cognitive mapping 4, 163–165 cognitive narratology 161–169; cognitive analysis concepts and tools 163–165; illustration 165–169; space and place in 162–163 Cognitive Principles, Critical Practice: Reading Literature at University (Reichl) 115 cognitive theory 91–92 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 183 Cohen, Margaret 70 Cole, Teju 90–91, 93, 96–97 Coleman, Wanda 135, 138 collaborative teaching 34 “Color Struck” (Hurston) 147 “Coming Home, Detroit, 1968” (Levine) 125–126 Conrad, Joseph 69, 72–73, 178 Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius) 186 constitutive relationing, space as 15–17, 19 Copway, George 81, 83 Country and the City, The (Williams) 5, 73, 115 Coxe, William 154 Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Jackson) 35 Crane, Walter 72 Crawford, Mary 153 Cresswell, Tim 219 Crisis, The (magazine) 146–147 critical spatial theory: pragmatic pedagogy for 34–38; text selection 34–38 Critical Terms for Literary Study (Lentricchia and McLaughlin) 5 Cullen, Countee 146 cultural geography 18 Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Ideas (ed. Atkinson et al.) 219 cultural-political resistance 132–139 Culture and Imperialism (Said) 70, 80, 201 Culture of Cities, The (Mumford) 35 Cussler, Clive 221, 223–225 Daáood, Kamau 138 Daley, A. Stuart 64 Dancing to Almendra (Montero) 54

Index

Daniels, Jim 123 Davis, Mike 43, 45, 54 de Certeau, Michel 19, 37–38, 91–92, 95–96, 112, 132, 173–174, 176 Dees, John 41–45 deictic shift 161–163, 165 Deleuze, Gilles 23–25, 27–29, 208 “Description of a City Shower” (Swift) 113 deterritorialization 23–29, 213, 215 Detroit in literature 121–129 Dever, Carolyn 70 Devil’s Night and Other True Tales of Detroit (Chafets) 121, 127 Dickens, Charles 72–73 Dictionary of Geography, The 16 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 23 Different Mirror, A: A History of Multicultural America (Takaki) 190–191 Digital Harlem website 147 Digital Humanities 40, 118, 132 digitization of materials 145, 177–178 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 35 Dolan, Harry 137–138 Dolezal, Rachel 55 Dora Bruder (Modiano) 106 double consciousness 191 Douglas, David Charles 182 Dragon (Cussler) 221, 223–225 Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Boyer) 37 Dreiser, Theodore 126 Dr. No (Fleming) 220–225 DuBois, W. E. B. 191 Duffy, Enda 179 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice 146 Dusinberre, Juliet 62 Eggers, Dave 161–162, 165–169 Eiffel, Gustave 100 “Eiffel Tower, The” (Barthes) 91, 100 eighteenth-century literature 111–118 Eliade, Mircea 35 Eliot, George 73 Ellison, Ralph 192 Emmott, Catherine 162 empathy 50 Emperor of Ocean Park, The (Graham) 196 empty space 84 enclosed space 24 encounter, nomadic classroom and 24–25, 28–29 Engelbrecht, Frederik J. 17 English in Practice (Barry) 1

229

English literature: British children’s fantasy literature 208–217; medieval 181–188 environmentalism 58, 67 epic 17 Epp, Roger 84 Erdrich, Louise 52–53 Ermine, Willie 84 Esty, Jed 179 ethical space 84 Eugenides, Jeffrey 123 Evelina (Burney) 113, 117 experiential learning 24, 60 Faerie Tale (Feist) 225 fantasy literature, British children’s 208–217 Fauconnier, Gilles 161 Fauset, Jesse Redmon 146 Federal Housing Administration 122 Feist, Raymond E. 225 feminine sublime 151 feminist pedagogy 133 figure-ground relationships 163, 166 Fire!! (magazine) 147 flâneur 90, 94–96, 104, 117 Fleming, Ian 220–225 Fludernik, Monika 161–163 food distribution, Paris and 105 Ford, Henry, II 125 Forest School 58–67 Forster, E. M. 178–179 Foucault, Michel 3, 15, 24, 31, 35–37, 206 Four Souls (Erdrich) 52–53 freedom, educating as the practice of 134 Freire, Paulo 53, 133 Freund, David M. P. 122 Froebel, Friedrich 59 From Behind the Veil (Stepto) 191, 198 From the Ashes:Voices from Watts (Schulberg) 137 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 54, 197 Gay, John 113, 117 gender: gendering of literary work 143; travel writing 150–156; in The Wind in the Willows (Grahame) 216–217; women and geography in American Literature survey 141–148 Gender and Space in British Literature 1660–1820 (Narain and Gerwitz) 154 genius loci 165 genre fiction and spatiality 219–225 geocriticism 2, 4, 6, 40, 47; literary cartography and 78; methodology 115–116; teaching Canadian literature

230

Index

in Treaty 6 territory 77–84; teaching literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London 111–118 Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 2, 5–6, 32, 40–47 geography: imaginative geographies of India 200–207; psychogeography 104; women and geography in American Literature survey 141–148 geopolitics 224 “George” (Randall) 123 Gerald of Wales 185 Gerwitz, Karen 154 Gilbert, Victor 102 Gilpin, William 152 Gingrich, Newt 121 GIS see Geographical Information Systems Gleaners and I, The (film) 105 globalization 4 Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Keating) 183 Goldsmith, Oliver 80 Google Maps 5, 46, 74, 135 Google Tour Builder 74 Goonewardena, Kanishka 18 Gower, John 186 Graham, Lawrence Otis 196 Grahame, Kenneth 208–209, 215–217 Grande, Sandy 52 Granqvist, Raoul 153 Great Fire of 1666, London 111–118 Gregory, Derek 4, 31 Greimas, A. J. 162 Guattari, Félix 23, 25, 27–29 Habermas, Jürgen 37–38 Hadrian’s Wall 182 Hagglund, Betty 154 Halttunen, Karen 40 Hamilton, Louis 43 Hammer, Peter 129 “Hands, The – A Story” (Bonner) 147 Hardy, Thomas 70, 73, 75 “Harlem Dancer” (McKay) 147 Harlem in the 1920s 146–148 Harlem Renaissance Map 147 Harley, J. B. 79 Harries, Karsten 13 Harrison-Kahan, Lori 193 Hartley, Debra 151 Harvey, David 4–5, 31, 43, 45, 143–144, 172, 174–175, 177 Hasselhorst, J. H. 52 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 103 Hayden, Dolores 132, 134–135

Hayden, Robert 123 Head over Heels (Shalvis) 225 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 69, 72–73, 75, 178 Hegglund, Jon 179 Heidegger, Martin 16 Helgerson, Richard 65 Herman, David 161–165 heterotopia 35 Higgins, Peter 60 Himes, Chester 132 Histoire et recherches des antiquities de la ville de Paris (Sauval) 102 historically organized survey of American literature 141–142 history: place subordinated to 3; territorial history of place 134–135 Hodgson, Amanda 211 Holdstock, Robert 225 Hollis, Leo 114 Hologram for the King, The (Eggers) 161–162, 165–169 Holub, Miroslav 1 Holy Land Experience theme park 19–20 Home (Morrison) 54 “Homeland, Aztlán, The” (Anzaldúa) 54 Homer 17 hooks, bell 50, 53, 134 House and Home (course) 49, 55 House on Mango Street (Cisneros) 198 Howards End (Forster) 178–179 Hubbard, Phil 219 H+U+D (University of Pennsylvania initiative) 99–100 Hughes, Langston 146–147 Hugo, Victor 91, 102–103 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (Hugo) 91 Hurston, Zora Neale 146–147, 192 identity: imaginative geographies of India 200–207; literature and medieval English borderland 181–188 Image of the City, The (Lynch) 37, 102 Imaginary Homelands (Rushdie) 205–206 imaginary space 200, 203, 206 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 51 imagined space 19 Imlay, Fanny 151 Imlay, Gilbert 150, 156 Imperial Federation Map of the World 72 imperialism 70, 210 “Importance of the Act of Reading, The” (Freire) 133

Index

Inca Gold (Cussler) 225 India, imaginative geographies of 200–207 Indigenous peoples, Canadian 77–84 inequality, psychology and sexuality of 126 “‘In His Own Home’: Gendering the African American Domestic Sphere in Contemporary Culture” (Levine) 197 injustices, spatial 135 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 24 interdisciplinarity 33, 99–107 “Invisible Flâneur, The” (Wilson) 96 Invisible Man (Ellison) 192 Iser, Wolfgang 116 Island Genres (Crane and Fletcher) 222 islands 221–225 Izenour, Steven 37 Jackson, Kenneth T. 35 Jackson, Rosemary 208 James, Henry 70 James I (King) 186 Jameson, Fredric 4, 164, 173, 175–176 Jessop, Martyn 40, 42, 45 Johnson, Greg 126 Johnson, Harold 84 Johnson, Samuel 116, 118 Johnston, Arthur 211 Jones, Edward P. 54 Jones, Manina 81 Joseph, Lawrence 127–128 Journey Through Wales, The (Gerald of Wales) 185 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 71–73 kaleidoscope 93–94 Kalliney, Peter 179 Kaskiwagi, Hiroshi 132 Keating, AnaLouise 183 Kennedy, Robert F. 136 Kennedy, Vallejo Ryan 137 Kern, Stephen 174, 176 Keywords (Williams) 5 Kilpatrick, Kwame 121–122 Kim (Kipling) 200–205, 207 kindergarten 59 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 134 King Lear (Shakespeare) 61 Kingis Quair (James I) 186 Kingsley, Charles 208–211 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark 203 Kinsley, Zoë 154 Kipling, Rudyard 70, 200–205, 207 Knight, Sara 59, 65 Known World, The (Jones) 54

231

Koreatown (Los Angeles) 136–137 Kubrick, Stanley 13 La Haine (film) 106 “L.A. Love Cry” (Coleman) 135 Labov, William 91 Ladies’ Paradise, The (Zola) 102–104 Laguerre, Michael 49–50 “Land and the People are Inseparable, The” (Silko) 52–53 landscape architecture 18 Langland, William 187–188 Larsen, Nella 146 Latham, Sean 145 law, intersection of space and 15 Leach, Mrs. Henry G. 147 Leach, Neil 14 Leader-Picone, Cameron 195 learning: confronting difference 23–25; experiential 24, 60; outdoor 58–67; signs and 23–25 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Brown and Izenour) 37 Le Corbusier 37 Lectures at the College de France (Foucault) 35 Lefebvre, Henri 18, 31, 36, 132, 173 legibility elements 101–102 Lentricchia, Frank 4–5 Lesage, André 91 Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Wollstonecraft) 150–156 Let the Great World Spin (McCann) 93 Leverette, Tru 193–194 Levine, Andrea 197 Levine, Philip 124–126 Life and Times of Joaquin Murieta, The (Ridge) 46–47 Lighthall, W. D. 80 Linde, Charlotte 91, 163 literary cartography 6, 17–18; creating maps 41–43; geocriticism and 78; The Life and Times of Joaquin Murieta (Ridge) 46–47; mapping multiethnic texts in literary classroom 40–48; teaching Canadian literature in Treaty 6 territory 77–84; teaching literary cartographies of race, space, place, and displacement 49–56; teaching Victorian literature through 69–75; Tropic of Orange (Yamashita) 41–46 Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century 161 literary geography 2, 4, 6

232

Index

literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London 111–118 literary map 224 literary studies: cluster approach to 143–148; sparking independent critical thinking about space and place 219; women and geography in American Literature survey 141–148; see also spatial literary studies literary urban studies, teaching 89–97 Lodge, Thomas 63 London: in The Story of the Amulet (Nesbit) 213–215; teaching literary landscapes of eighteenth-century 111–118 London: A Social and Cultural History (Buchholz and Ward) 114 London in the Eighteen Century (White) 114 London Rising: The Men Who Made Modern London (Hollis) 114 London Spy, The (Ward) 113, 116–117 López, Ian F. Haney 51 Lorde, Audre 133 Los Angeles, mapping a fictional account of 41–46 Lost in the City (Jones) 54 Lynch, Kevin 37, 101–102 Lyons, Anthony 138 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 61 machine de guerre 24, 29 Machine in the Garden, The (Marx) 35 Makdisi, Saree 70 Making of Modern Paris, The (course) 99–107 “Man of the Crowd, The” (Poe) 95 Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton) 104 Mano, Sandra 191 map narrative spatial strategy 163–164 mapping: cognitive 163–165; collaborative in California Literature seminar 132; Watts Writers Workshop 137–139 mapping multiethnic texts in literary classroom 40–48; creating maps 41–43; virtual learning community 45–48 Mapping the Lake Project 42 maps 1–2; inclusion of as paratexts 224; legibility elements 101–102; literary map 224; modernity and 174–176; Paris 101–102 “Maps, Knowledge, and Power” (Harley) 79 Marcus, Sharon 70 Margolin, Uri 161 Marville, Charles 103 Marx, Leo 35

Marxist and feminist philosophy of teaching 144–145 Marxist-materialist thinking 14 Mason, Charlotte Osgood 146 Massey, Doreen 32, 142–143, 173–174, 176 Master and Margarita, The (Bulgakov) 91 McCann, Colum 93 McDowell, Linda 142 McKay, Claude 146–147 McLaren, Peter 51, 55 McLaughlin, Thomas 5 McPherson, Patricia 177 medieval English literature 181–188 Mellor, Anne 151 mestiza 183 “Metropolis and Mental Life, The” (Simmel) 35 Michie, Helena 71 Middle Ages 181–188 Middlemarch (Eliot) 72–73 Middlesex (Eugenides) 123 Midnight Ramble, The (Anonymous) 113, 117 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 200–201, 203, 205–207 Miller, J. Hillis 70, 73, 142 Miller, Zac 45 Millionaire, Tony 147 Mills, Sara 153 Milne, Anna-Louise 100 Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things (Laguerre) 49–50 Mitchell, Peta 47 Mitchem, Jamie 45 Mitterand, Henri 101, 105 modern literature, space and movement and 172–179 modernism 172–179 modernity 172–179 Modiano, Patrick 106 Monet, Claude 102 Montero, Mayra 54 Montrose, Louis 62 Moodie, Susanna 81–83 Moorman, Charles 187 Moretti, Franco 41, 44, 70, 72, 95 Morrison, Toni 54 Moss, Laura 78 Moss, Pamela 142 motion verbs 164, 166 movement, modern literature and 172–179 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 179 Mumford, Lewis 35 Mythago (Holdstock) 225

Index

Nadja (Breton) 104 Nahawai, Nafis 138 Narain, Mona 154 Nardizzi, Vin 58, 65–66 narrative space 163–164, 167, 169, 221 narrative/story world 164, 221 narrative universe 164–165 narratology 161–169 “Nation and Narration” (Shah) 204 Nelson, Brian 103 neoliberalism 162, 166 Nesbit, E. 208–209, 213–215 Neville, Cynthia 186 New Challenge (magazine) 146 New Imperialism, The (Harvey) 36 New Left movement 14 New Oxford Companion to Law (eds. Cane and Conaghan) 15 Nikolajeva, Maria 208 nomadic classroom 23–29 non-places in British children’s fantasy literature 208–217 Norman Conquest 182 Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo) 102–103 nowhereness 19 Nugent, Richard Bruce 147 Oates, Joyce Carol 126–127 Obama, Barack 121, 137 O’Byrne, Alison 114 Odyssey, The (Homer) 17 Oliver, Akilah 138 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 71–72, 74 O’Loughlin, Thomas 185 Open City (Cole) 90–91, 93, 96–97 Optical Character Reader (OCR) 42 Orr, Kevyn 121 outdoor learning 58–67 Palmer, Jerry 220, 222 panopticism 35 panorama 89–94, 97 Paris, spaces of modern through literature and design 99–107 Paris Peasant, The (Aragon) 104 Park, Lisa Sun-Hee 33 “Patriotism and Racism” (Anderson) 51 pedagogy: cluster approach to literary study 143–148; for critical spatial theory 34–38; feminist 133, 135; Forest School 58–67; graduate course in spatial studies 31–38; interdisciplinary spatial studies 32–34; literary cartography 43–45; mapping multiethnic texts in literary

233

classroom 40–48; teaching literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London 111–118; virtual learning community 45–48 Petit, Philippe 93 Phillipot, William 33 Piatti, Barbara 40 Piers Plowman (Langland) 187–188 Pilger, John 205 place: defining 219; enhanced role in literary studies 2; literature and medieval English borderland 181–188; nomadic classroom 23–29; as palimpsest 134–136; storying 19; territorial history of 134–135 placemindedness 6 “Planetarity” (Pratt) 153 Plath, Sylvia 89–90 play, role of 59–60, 67 plot, in the thriller 220 Poe, Edgar Allan 94–95 Poeta in San Francisco (Reyes) 132 Poetics of Space (Bachelard) 163 Pollock, Griselda 95 popular genre fiction and spatiality 219–225 Popular Genres (course) 219–225 “Post-Black Stories: Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor and Racial Individualism” (Leader-Picone) 195 postcolonial studies 4 postmodernism 3–4 powell, john a. 122 power geometry 173, 176 Power of Place, The (Hayden) 132, 134 Practice of Everyday Life, The (de Certeau) 37–38 Pratt, Mary Louise 153 Prezi 74 Prinsloo, Johan 18 Production of Space, The (Lefebvre) 31, 36 Prohm, Alan 90 projective locations 163–164, 167 Promise Zone 137 proto-feminism 150 Proust, Marcel 24, 28 Proust and Signs (Deleuze) 24 psychogeography 104 public sphere 37 Quiller-Couch, Arthur 62 race: Caucasia (Senna) and 191–194; ethnic American literature 190–198; teaching literary cartographies of 49–56; The Water-Babies (Kingsley) and 209, 211, 217

234

Index

Race, Place, and Displacement (course) 49, 53, 55 Randall, Dudley 123 Rankine, Claudia 54 reading: close 7, 55, 135–136, 138–139, 142, 148, 222; reading the world and reading the word 133; strategies at university 115 real-and-imagined places 6–7, 116 referentiality 117 region, landmarks and paths in narratives 163–164, 166, 169 regional diversity 142 regionalism 3 Reichl, Susanne 115 Repko, Allen F. 33 resistance, cultural-political 132–139 Rethinking Architecture (Leach) 14 “Re-visions of Difference in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia” (Leverette) 193–194 Reyes, Barbara Jane 132 Rhetoric of English India, The (Suleri) 201 Rhys, Jean 179 Richards, Thomas 179 Rico, Barbara 191 Ridge, John Rollin 46 Rising Village, The (Goldsmith) 80 risk, exposure to in outdoor learning 59–61 ritual grounds 191–192, 195–198 Rosalynde (Lodge) 63 Rose, Gillian 142 Rossi, Aldo 37 Roughing It in the Bush (Moodie) 82 Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (Bird) 152 Roy, Kaustuv 25–26 Royal Geographic Society 71 Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (Bloom) 201 rural environment, Forest School and 58, 61–67 Rushdie, Salman 200–201, 203, 205–207 Ryan, Marie-Laure 161, 163–165, 221 Sackville-West, Vita 179 Sacred and the Profane, The: The Nature of Religion (Eliade) 35 Sag Harbor (Whitehead) 191–192, 195–197 Said, Edward W. 4, 70, 80, 175, 201–202 Salter, Elizabeth 187–188 “Sand-Clock Days, The” (Dolan) 138 Sauval, Henri 102 Schlesinger, Arthur M. 35 Schulberg, Budd 137–138 Scotland 182, 186 Scott, Johnie 137 “Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art” (Breton) 104

Security, Territory, Population (Foucault) 35 Sedille, Paul 102 Seducers in Ecuador (Sackville-West) 179 Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, The 146 Semetsky, Inna 25, 29 Senna, Danzy 191–194 Sentinel, The (Clarke) 13 Seshagiri, Urmila 179 setting 164, 221 Seven Arts, The (magazine) 147 Shah, Bilel A. 204 Shakespeare, William 58, 61–67 Shalvis, Jill 225 “Significance of the Frontier in American History, The” (Turner) 52 Signifying, Monkey, The (Gates) 54 signs, learning and 23–25 Silko, Leslie Marmon 52, 198 Simmel, Georg 35 Situationist International 104 sketching 34 Slums of Aspen, The: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (Park) 33 Smith, Johnathan Z. 35–36 Smith, Neil 36 “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” (Nugent) 147 smooth space 23–26, 28–29 “Social Construction of Race, The” (López) 51 Social Justice in the City (Harvey) 31, 36 social space 4, 6, 16–17, 24, 208–215, 217 “Social Space” (Lefebvre) 132 Soja, Edward W. 4, 6–7, 31–32, 43, 45, 116 “Soluble Fish” (Breton) 104 Songs of the Great Dominion (Lighthall) 80 space: authentic 19–20; constitutive relationing 15–17, 19; defining 219; enhanced role in literary studies 2; layeredness of 18; modern literature and 172–179; nomadic classroom 23–29; as social construction 15 “Space” (Ryan) 163 Space, City, and Literature (course) 90, 92, 95–96 Space Odyssey (course) 13–14, 20 “Space/Place” (Hubbard) 219 Spaces of Global Capitalism (Harvey) 36 space-time cluster 144–148 spatial frames 164, 221 spatial humanities 4, 6, 99–107 spatial injustices 135 spatial literary criticism and theory, courses in 5 spatial literary studies 2, 5–7; lexicon of 219–220; medieval English borderland literature 181–188; outdoor learning 58–67; see also literary studies

Index

spatial stories 19 spatial studies: interdisciplinary pedagogy 32–34; pedagogy for graduate course in 31–38; pragmatic pedagogy for critical spatial theory 34–38; see also spatial literary studies spatial studies, graduate course in: alternating weeks schedule 32; collaborative teaching 34; interdisciplinary syllabus 32–33; sketching 34; text selection 33–34 spatial turn in the humanities 2–5, 15, 172, 219; historical perspective 31–32; pedagogy for teaching about 32–38 spatiality: of being human 16–17; definition 16; of early Canadian literature 78–80; event of being-space 14–16; imaginative geographies of India 200–207; popular genre fiction and 219–225; as socially produced space 15 spatially oriented critical theory 2 Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American Literature, The (Brand) 94 Spleen de Paris (Baudelaire) 104 spy thriller 220–225 Stadler, Jane 47 Starting from Loomis and Other Stories (Kashiwagi) 132 State, striated space and 27–28 Stepto, Robert 191, 198 Story Logic (Herman) 163 Story of the Amulet, The (Nesbit) 208–209, 213–215 story space 164, 221 storying 19 storyworlds, space and place in fictional 161–169 Straley, Jessica 211 striated space 23, 25, 27–28 Strohm, Paul 182 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The (Habermas) 37 Sugars, Cynthia 78 Sugrue, Thomas J. 122–123, 125 Suleri, Sara 201 Swift, Jonathan 113 Szent-Györgi, Albert 1 Takaki, Ronald 190–191 Talbot Road: A Poem (Burwell) 78–79 Tally, Robert T., Jr. 82, 115–116, 176, 208 teaching: Canadian literature in Treaty 6 territory 77–84; Detroit in literature 121–129; ethnic American literature 190–198; importance of space and time 190–198; literary cartographies of race,

235

space, place, and displacement 49–56; literary landscapes of eighteenth-century London 111–118; literary urban studies 89–97; literary works and culturalpolitical resistance 132–139; Marxist and feminist philosophy 144–145; medieval English literature 181–188; non-places in British children’s fantasy literature 208–217; popular genre fiction and spatiality 219–225; spaces of modern Paris through literature and design 99–107; Victorian literature through cartography 69–75; women and geography in American Literature survey 141–148 Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (hooks) 134 Terrell, Katherine 186 territorial history of place 134–135 Thacker, Andrew 179, 208 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) 192 Theis, Jeffrey S. 64 them (Oates) 126–127 third space 223 Thomas, Ronald R. 71 Thompson, Carl 153 Thorpe, Lewis 185 Thrall: Poems (Trethewey) 52–53 Thrift, Nigel 4 thrillers 219–225 Thurston, John 82 time: emphasis on rather than space 142; historically organized survey of American literature 141–142; space subordinated to 3 Time Regained (Proust) 28 time-space compression 174–175, 177 Tobler, Nina 196 Todorov, Tzvetan 220 “Tokens of Being There: Land Deeds and Demarcations” (Bentley) 79 Topographies (Miller) 73 topological and projective locations 163–164 Topophilia (Tuan) 31, 35 topophrenia 6 topo-text 18 To Take Place: Toward a Theory in Ritual (Smith) 35 tour narrative spatial strategy 163–164 Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier) 37 Traill, Catharine Parr 81 travel writing 150–156 “Traveling Cultures” (Clifford) 154 Treaty 6 77–84 Trethewey, Natasha 52–53

236

Index

Trivia (Gay) 117 Tropic of Orange (Yamashita) 41–46, 54 Tuan, Yi-Fu 31, 35, 222 Tucker, Irene 70 Tupener, Katie 70 Turner, Frederick Jackson 52 Turner, Mark 161 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 13–14 Uffelman, Larry 210 Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Smith) 36 “Upon Westminister Bridge” (Wordsworth) 113 urban planning 36–37 urban studies: Detroit 121–129; resilience 105; spaces of modern Paris through literature and design 99–107; teaching literary 89–97 Urry, John 31 utopia 19 Vacationland: Tourism and the Environment in the Colorado High Country (Phillipot) 33 Valdez, Luis 132 van den Berg, Jan Hendrik 17 Van Der Rohe, Mies 37 Varda, Agnès 105 Venturi, Robert 37 verbs, motion 164, 166 vernacular tradition 191 Verne, Jules 178 Victorian literature, teaching through cartography 69–75 Vidler, Anthony 52 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 103 Virgin River (Carr) 225 virtual learning community 45–48 vitalism 210 Voices from Leimert Park: A Poetry Anthology (Buchanan) 138 Voices of Sag Harbor: A Village Remembers (Tobler) 196 Voyage in the Dark (Rhys) 179 Wales 182, 185–186 walk, city 90–91, 94–97, 104, 117 Walking, Rambling and Promenading in Eighteenth-Century London: A Literary and Cultural History (O’Byrne) 114 “Walking in the City” (de Certeau) 92, 96, 112, 132

Walkowitz, Rebecca 179 Walpole, Horace 153 War in the Air, The (Wells) 179 Ward, Joseph 114 Ward, Ned 113, 116–117 Wars of Independence, Scotland 182 Water-Babies, The (Kingsley) 208–211 Watson, Robert N. 63 Watt, Ian 70 Watts Uprising (1965) 137–138 Watts Writers Workshop 132, 137–139 We Are All Treaty People (Epp) 84 “Weary Blues, The” (Hughes) 147 Wells, H. G. 179 West, Dorothy 146 Westphal, Bertrand 3, 6, 78, 81–83, 115–116 WHAT and WHERE systems of spatial cognition 164, 167 “What Work Is” (Levine) 124 White, Jerry 114 white supremacy 49, 56 Whitehead, Colson 191–192, 195–197 Widener, Daniel 137–138 Williams, Raymond 5, 62, 73, 115 Willson, Thomas B. 154 Wilson, Elizabeth 95–96 Wilson, Richard 63 Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame) 208–209, 215–217 Wirth-Nesher, Hana 96 Wolff, Janet 95 Wollstonecraft, Mary 150–156 women: and geography in American Literature survey 141–148; recognizing work in space and time 141–144; travel writing 150–156 Woodbridge, Linda 64–65 Woolf, Virginia 179 “Word Clouds” activity 221 Wordsworth, William 113 “Writing Watts: The Rise and Fall of Cultural Liberalism” (Widener) 137 Yamashita, Karen Tei 41–46, 54 Young, Coleman 121–122 Young, Hershini Bhana 192 Zola, Emile 102–104 “Zoot Riots are Race Riots” (Himes) 132 Zoot Suit (Valdez) 132