I originally wrote and published this post on the Landscape Surgery blog of the Social, Cultural and Historical Geography Research Group in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Landscape Surgery is a fortnightly seminar series that the SCHG hosts during term-time. Sessions are typically organised around a theme for which speakers (including external invitees) talk about their research, followed by questions/general discussion on the topic; though it can also include workshops and research training sessions. I attend the sessions as part of my PhD activities, and am one of four editors of the Landscape Surgery blog.
The session discussed in this post was organised around the theme of 'Literary Geographies'. Thanks to Alice Reynolds and Megan Harvey for editing this post.
The session discussed in this post was organised around the theme of 'Literary Geographies'. Thanks to Alice Reynolds and Megan Harvey for editing this post.
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Our third Landscape Surgery of the autumn term discussed the topic of
Literary Geographies, with presentations from three of the department’s
visiting scholars: Nattie Golubov (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México),
Lucrezia Lopez (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) and Giada Peterle
(University of Padua). Each presenter discussed the ways in which their
research has engaged with different forms of literature, and what their
individual methodologies can contribute to geographical study. This was followed
by a panel discussion that grappled more broadly with what encounters between
literature and geographical inquiry can achieve.
Our presenters in discussion during the session |
Our first speaker on the day, Nattie Golubov, has been a professor at
the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at UNAM since 1995, having taught
widely on English literature, literary and cultural theory. Her research
engages in the critical study of a variety of types of American texts, to
understand how relationships between diverse groups of people in the US are
expressed culturally.
Nattie began by highlighting how academic literature on migration has
tended to view the process from perspectives of postcolonialism, diaspora and
exile, while focusing disproportionately on the point of departure and the
point of arrival. Using Teju Cole’s (2017) book Blind Spot as
a point of reference, she explained how literary approaches to the topic of
migration can be fruitful for scholarship on this subject, with stories in the
form of novels and other texts being able to evoke thetranslocal (relationships
between specific locations within countries, not just between
countries); complicate the binaries of nomadic/sedentary and centre/periphery which
have characterised existing migration scholarship; and foster critical
reflection on the geographies of where texts on migration are written,
published, read and translated.
In her current research, Nattie has been examining contemporary US
romance literature that tells stories about American soldiers in Afghanistan.
What she finds interesting about these texts, she explained, is how the subject
matter of the stories is at once heavily geopolitical, yet grounded
in the ‘normal’ and everyday. While the locations portrayed by
the novels can lead to an awareness of the planetary, this is typically
foregrounded by familiar tropes of small-town America and the space of the
house/home.
With romance being a very popular genre that is widely read in the US –
especially by women – this can render the representations used in the novels
problematic, notably through the sometimes shocking language that describes
places in the Global South. Nattie gave the example of one location being
referred to as the ‘armpit of the world’; while simultaneously the novels
perpetuate a fantasy of whiteness and enclosure in these territories.
Nattie’s work is seeking to ask what it is about the ‘normal’ that is so
attractive and tenacious in literature. And in turn, what kinds of (geographical)
relationships do these novels forge with the reader? Can they produce
a new type of sociality around the topic of migration?
Our second presenter was Lucrezia Lopez, whose research explores
practices of tourism, heritage and religious expression by investigating how
they are represented and interpreted culturally. Her current research, titled
in this presentation as ‘The Contemporary Spaces of the Way of St. James’,
studies the travel diaries of those sharing their experiences of pilgrimage on
the Camino de Santiago.
Lucrezia started by outlining how literature, cinema and the internet
are contributing to a new spatial discourse of the Camino de Santiago;
reinforcing the notion that there are multiple ‘Caminos’ articulated by the
different artists and writers who represent it.
Travel diaries in particular are a relatively new method people are
using to share their experiences of travelling on the Camino, reflecting a
broader turn in the literature towards exploring the internaljourneys
of pilgrims taking part. Lucrezia identified two trends within the travel
diaries’ representations of walking the Camino: neo-romanticism,
reflecting the aesthetic value of travel diaries in conveying
emotions/feelings and representing an idyllic rural landscape; and neo-realism,
reflecting the testimonial value of travel diaries in drawing
attention to traffic, waste and issues of sustainability on the Camino.
As for the act of writing itself, Lucrezia has found that a concept
of liminality or ‘in-between’ space is expressed through
practices of documenting the pilgrimage using travel diaries. The process of
writing about the landscape in this way is believed to cultivate a
different sense of self; a cathartic, therapeutic and/or spiritual
practice that is part of the pilgrimage. However, some of these writers have
been exploring this intimacy using alternative forms of representation than
just text. Lucrezia referred to the comic book On the Camino by
Norwegian artist Jason (2017), and how his use of images portrays the practice
of pilgrimage on the Camino using popular visual tropes of the solitary
thinking walker, bridges, and rural landscapes.
Ultimately, Lucrezia located three spaces through which the travel
diaries operate: the space of the reader, the subjective space of the
pilgrim/author, and the physical space of the Camino itself. How the Camino is
imagined is a product of the work that varying forms of representation (e.g.
comic book versus text) do in these spaces, alongside the personal discourses
that are performed through individual practices of writing, reading and
walking.
With wider relevance for thinking about methodology within literary
geographies, Lucrezia finished by speaking about some of the challenges she
has faced while studying travel diaries for her research. Which sources do you
choose to consult, which do you leave, and why? Which academic research should
be consulted, amongst the wide range of scholarship on the Camino? And could
examining this kind of literature for research be a ‘leading’ methodology,
privileging the researcher’s own interpretations of the texts?
Our final speaker was Giada Peterle, a post-doctoral research fellow and
lecturer whose work is creative and interdisciplinary, bringing a range of
narrative forms to her academic study within geography to think about the ways
we understand, shape and represent the places we inhabit. Her current project
is titled ‘Urban Literary Geographies: Mapping the city through narrative
interpretation and creative practice’.
Giada’s presentation started by situating her work within a wider
trajectory of creative geographies. She charted how the dialogical exchange
between geographical and literary theory, as well as an existing and ongoing
reciprocal exchange between place and literature, has been an important
influence within the recent creative (re)turn in geography
(e.g. Hawkins 2013; Madge, 2014). As well as fostering interdisciplinarity,
this scholarship has approached storytelling not just as a form of
representation, but as a creative practice to engage with, in
which the embodied experiences of academics themselves can inform research.
Giada illustrated how her work has entered the domain of creative
practice through Street Geography, a collaborative project between
several geographers at the University of Padua with Progetto Giovani (based in
the Office of the Municipality of Padua), which aims to encourage dialogue between
academic research, art practice, and Padua citizens in an effort to contribute
to the conceptualisation and realisation of more meaningful and sustainable
cities. Street Geographybrought together three geographers and
three artists to create three site-specific exhibitions in Padua that question
the ways people live in cities, as well as the significance of change, movement
and relationships in shared urban spaces.
This presentation concentrated on one of these site-specific
exhibitions, A station of stories: moving narrations, which was
undertaken in Padua railway station. Giada recounted how the project team
wanted this site-specific work to reflect the varied mobilities and stories that
the station embodies, as an environment of co-presence and contradictions:
between transit and encounter, consumption and dwelling, work and criminality,
encounter and exclusion.
This conceptual approach led to an idea of the material space of the
station itself being a narrator. Using this tactic in their
writing, the team aimed to provoke empathy with the place; challenging
anthropocentric understandings of the station by imagining the site telling
stories of its own changing environment from a non-human perspective.
In turn, the team hoped to enable readers to think about how, when and on what
terms different stories of the city are told. This latter objective was
especially relevant as most of the station’s spaces are normally used for
advertising. How could these spaces be appropriated to encourage people to think
critically about the station as a confluence of diverse stories?
The team’s answer was to use the comic book form. As a type of
literature that is easy to read and accessible, but also quite mobile in
how it is read, using comics took into account the different entry points and
directions of movement from which the story could be approached and interpreted
in the station. This depth of engagement was facilitated by the comic’s physical
presence as a public art exhibition; though the physicality of the comic
panels also brought practical challenges. Giada recalled finding all the
exhibition panels face down on the ground only the morning after mounting them
for display, and consequently having to change the way they were stuck up. The
team were also concerned that members of the public writing on the panels might
obscure the material shown.
In the end, the physical positioning of the panels in the station
successfully engaged diverse audiences of academics, travellers and residents
through a series of intentional and accidental encounters with the artwork.
Creative geographical approaches such as those adopted in Street
Geography, Giada contended, demonstrate how encounters between geography
and art can engage wider communities with the discipline, by seeing it as a
creative approach towards understanding spaces that incorporates their materialities and affects,
as well as the personal experiences of researchers.
The three presentations were followed by a panel discussion, which
picked up on points of crossover between Nattie, Lucrezia and Giada’s work.
In a conversation on what the spatial perspective of
geography can offer literature, our presenters considered the complex
relationship between ‘real’ physical spaces and how they are represented in
fiction. They reflected on how geographical approaches and (creative)
methodologies that investigate the spaces of readers, writers and publishers,
such as Innes Keighren’s work on geographies of the book (e.g. Keighren, 2013),
can attend to the ways in which literary representations of space are
implicated within the wider social, political and material processes through
which different literatures are produced and consumed.
It was also suggested that the themes of mobility and non-linearity within
geographical thought can help with understanding how the form of
a text interacts with the way its geographies are experienced by the work’s
creators and readers. Our presenters concurred that such experiences of
literature have become increasingly non-linear, through both the unique and
interactive forms of consumption that digital technology enables, as well as
postmodernist trends in literature that have sought to think beyond linear
constructions of narrative.
Thank you to all three of our presenters for sharing some fascinating
insights from their research, and for all they have contributed as visiting
scholars to our research community in the Social, Cultural and Historical
Geography Research Group during their time at Royal Holloway.
Lucrezia Lopez, Nattie Golubov and Giada Peterle |
Bibliography
Cole, T. (2017) Blind Spot. London: Faber & Faber.
Hawkins, H. (2013) “Geography and art: An expanding field: Site, the
body, and practice” Progress in Human Geography 37(1):
52-71.
Jason (2017) On the Camino. Seattle: Fantagraphics.
Keighren, I.M. (2013) Geographies of the book: review and
prospect. Geography Compass 7(11): 745-758.
Madge, C. (2014) “On the creative (re)turn to geography: poetry,
politics and passion” Area 46(2): 178-185.
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