From Spatial Turn to GIS-Mapping of Literary Cultures

Abstract

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 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 systemic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, and so on). 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 analyses 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 aesthetically differentiated literary field.

GIS as a heuristic tool to interpret ancient historiography: A case study to reconstruct what could plausibly have happened according to the accounts in New Testament texts

“…Reconstructing the geography from a literary source has caveats. Juvan ( 2015 ) warns for naive mimetic materialism: “A cartographic representation of fictional settings […] placed on the base map of a real geospace” could be misleading, wrongly identifying the fictional places with a position in the perceived world and as such distorting the analysis of the spatial picture inside the narrative. However, conscious use of these tools might help to discover possible dissimilarities between the referential, imaginative world inside the text and the referenced, empirical world, and can highlight issues for further research.…”

“… 1 1 More examples, i.a ., can be found in Bodenhamer (2008), Owens et al. (2009), Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris (2010), Yuan (2010), Dear (2011), Bodenhamer, Harris, and Corrigan (2013), Caquard (2013), von Lünen and Travis (2013), Caquard and Cartwright (2014), da Silveira (2014), Gregory and Geddes (2014), Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris (2015), Gregory, Cooper, Hardie, and Rayson (2015), Juvan (2015), Juvan and Dokler (2015), Yuan, McIntosh, and Delozier (2015), and Travis and von Lünen (2016). …”

‘You’ll be very far from this place’: Temporal and spatial aspirations at Bridge International Academies in Kenya

“…With regard to the use of technologies in particular, scholars note that spaces are continuously (re)produced, changed, or imagined through the interplay of social practices and ideologies, as well as technology (Juvan, 2015). The use of technology in education can allude toor give an illusion ofmodernity and can break down spatial borders (Bolay and Rey, 2019;Resnik, 2008).…”