Literary Geography

Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of the spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systematic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, etc.). In conclusion, the author presents the tentative results of the research project “The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis,” which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyzes data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between “spaces in literature” and “literature in spaces” has historically established a nationalized and esthetically differentiated literary field.

Literary works as discursive articulation of the experience of residing in a space are becoming a legitimate subject of geographic inquiry. Postmodern geography also has adopted for its purposes some concepts from literary studies, such as intertextuality and landscape as text or geographic imagination. A qualitative analysis of selected examples of literary texts that thematize the space of Slovene Istria shows how topophilia, the Self/other identity distinction, and feelings of place and placelessness take shape in them. These are contemporary concepts of humanistic geography, which build on the predominantly objectivist, natural and social science tradition by taking into account individual and group apprehension, imagination, and formation of space. Literary works enable geography to analyze our relation to our living environs and the meanings that we attribute to the space or identify ourselves with. Our relations to space are also a fundamental condition for forming identities and societal responsibility.