Topophrenia (eBook)

Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination

Robert T. Tally (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2018
210 Seiten
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
978-0-253-03769-5 (ISBN)

Infos

1. This book is an exploration of the relationship between space, place, mapping, and literature and how an understanding of these relationships are now considered integral to contemporary work in the humanities and the social sciences

2. The author Robert Tally is a mid-career academic with a prodigious critical output. He serves on the editorial and editorial advisory boards of several journals, is series editor for Palgrave Macmillan's "Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies," and is an executive committee member of the MLA's Division on Literary Criticism. He has an online presence that includes a well-maintained website.

3. The book is written in a way that makes the adoption of single chapters for course packets possible and would appeal to graduate students and upper-level undergraduates working on literary theory.

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What is our place in the world, and how do we inhabit, understand, and represent this place to others? Topophrenia gathers essays by Robert Tally that explore the relationship between space, place, and mapping, on the one hand, and literary criticism, history, and theory on the other. The book provides an introduction to spatial literary studies, exploring in detail the theory and practice of geocriticism, literary cartography, and the spatial humanities more generally. The spatial anxiety of disorientation and the need to know one's location, even if only subconsciously, is a deeply felt and shared human experience. Building on Yi Fu Tuan's "topophilia" (or love of place), Tally instead considers the notion of "topophrenia" as a simultaneous sense of place-consciousness coupled with a feeling of disorder, anxiety, and "dis-ease." He argues that no effective geography could be complete without also incorporating an awareness of the lonely, loathsome, or frightening spaces that condition our understanding of that space. Tally considers the tension between the objective ordering of a space and the subjective ways in which narrative worlds are constructed. Narrative maps present a way of understanding that seems realistic but is completely figurative. So how can these maps be used to not only understand the real world but also to put up an alternative vision of what that world might otherwise be? From Tolkien to Cervantes, Borges to More, Topophrenia provides a clear and compelling explanation of how geocriticism, the spatial humanities, and literary cartography help us to narrate, represent, and understand our place in a constantly changing world.

Autor

Robert T. Tally Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University. His books include Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism; Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System; and Spatiality.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Cartographic Imperative

Part I: Place in Geocritical Theory and Practice

1. Topophrenia

2. Introducing Geocriticism

3. Geocritical Situations

Part II: Spatial Representation in Narrative

4. The Mise-en-Abyme of Literary Cartography

5. The Space of the Novel

6. Theatrum Geographicum

Part III: Fantasy and the Spatial Imagination

7. Adventures in Literary Cartography

8. In the Suburbs of Amaurotum

9. Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World

Conclusion: A Map of the Pyrenees

Bibliography

Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.11.2018
• Zusatzinfo: no b&w illus
• Verlagsort: Bloomington
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: Criticism • literary cartography • Literature • mapping • space • spatial humanities • Spatiality • Spatial turn
• ISBN-10: 0-253-03769-7 / 0253037697
• ISBN-13: 978-0-253-03769-5 / 9780253037695