This thematic section of the journal Primerjalna književnost, titled “The Spatial Turn in Literary Studies,” features fifteen articles that explain the history, ideological, and cultural context, manifestations, and meanings of the “spatial turn” that occurred in the humanities and social sciences at the end of the 1980s and enthroned geography for the first time as a general exporter of ideas. Which new horizons—if any at all—has the spatial turn opened up for literary studies to date and what else does it promise? What relationship does spatial epistemology enter into with temporality and narrativity, which have provided traditional foundations for literary history? What can be discovered by mapping and analyzing the relations between the geographical spaces that literature socially lives in and extends into, and the spaces depicted in textual worlds? What does observation that selects a specific historically connected geographical area (i.e., a city, region, continent, or even entire world) as its main object contribute to literary history by discussing this area in all of the diversity, interconnections, and conflicting nature of its cultural languages? How can literary representations be used to explore the social experience of actual places and landscapes? How were older and modern cartographic techniques used in literary geography? Does it even make sense to map literature today?
C.01 Editorial board of a foreign/international collection of papers/book
COBISS.SI-ID: 36592941Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies as a remaking of Kant's attempt to base knowledge on the scientific character of geography and anthropology, and as an improvement of historical contextualization methods through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. This article presents three examples of appropriating spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in research on the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systematic analysis of genre development and the spatial diffusion of genres using analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary culture spaces (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, etc.). The article concludes by outlining the research project led by the author, in which GIS technologies are used to map and analyze data on the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to demonstrate how interaction between "spaces in literature" and "literature in spaces" has historically established a nationalized and esthetically differentiated literary field.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 36730157The paper treats the network of memorials or memorial landmarks of Slovene literary culture, which began forming in the middle of the nineteenth century and yet today powerfully marks the Slovene territories’ cultural landscape. The first part of the paper reviews historical models for the formation of such networks, which can be understood as the semiotic appropriation of (national) space connected with the canonization of a handful of prominent »cultural saints« and numerous men of letters of lesser stature. Then the partial results of a GIS project to map Slovene literary memorials are appraised, along with its methodological challenges and possible contributions to a better understanding of the spaces of Slovene literary culture.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 36369965