Despite 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.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35787053
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.
COBISS.SI-ID: 50403170
The paper is a result of a project of using a geographic information system (GIS) to map the biographical data of prominent Slovenian writers from the beginnings of aesthetic production in Slovenian. Data selection for mapping entries and the means of their representation critically depart from the pioneering achievements in literary geography (Nagel, Nadler), which are associated with the “Blut und Boden” ideology. Among more recent studies, Schlosser’s literary cartography is considered. With their solutions and the purposes of the Slovenian project in mind, the article offers some suggestions regarding the conscription series of spatially linked biographical data and the relevant correlations among them. On this basis, thematic analytical maps for a contemporary areal analysis of Slovenian literary culture can be produced. The article introduces the first maps of the places of birth and death of Slovenian literary actors.
COBISS.SI-ID: 52050274
The status of literary mapping projects as applied to national capitals or large cities invites fascinating modes of exegesis. The use of literary maps, now one of the main tools in spatially-oriented literary studies, reveals, among other phe- nomena, the relationship between real and imaginary spaces. This essay proffers two options: maps used in literary studies in a limited fashion and in tandem with spatial studies - i.e., geographical analyses - or a renunciation of maps when literary imageries of cities are determined to be fictional and unreal. The latter possibility is supported particularly by modern sociological (re)conceptualisations of space, which, prior to the spatial turn in post-modernist studies, advocated the view that (city) space is a result of specific material features and of the social dynamics and practices of the users of that space. All considered, it is time perhaps that literary studies reconsider these models and the (appropriate or inappropriate) use of maps.
COBISS.SI-ID: 54440034
The atlas presents periods of lives that 94 selected Slovenian writers from the reformation to the present spent in Ljubljana. Biographies demonstrate a broad span of different literary and ideological orientations as well as turbulent social life in the Slovenian capital. Thematic maps, ordered according to literary periods, display locations where the writers lived, got their education, worked, dies, and were buried. The monograph includes many biographical data that have not been published yet.
COBISS.SI-ID: 274659072