Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Geocriticism on Facebook

If you are a Facebook user, please "like" the Geocriticism page. I will try to use it, along with this blog site, for regular updates.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies



Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Critical Studies, a collection of essays edited by Robert T. Tally Jr, will appear in October 2011 and is now available for pre-order. Here's the Table of Contents:

Foreword; B.Westphal
Introduction: On Geocriticism; R.T.Tally Jr.

PART I: GEOCRITICISM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond; E.Prieto
The Presencing of Place in Literature: Towards an Embodied Topopoetic Mode of Reading; S.Pultz Moslund

PART II: PLACES, SPACES, TEXTS
Redrawing the Map: An Interdisciplinary Geocritical Approach to Australian Cultural Narratives; P.Mitchell & J.Stadler
Textual Forests: The Representation of Landscape in Latin American Narratives; M.Mercedes Ortiz Rodriguez
Land of Racial Confluence and Spatial Accessibility: Claude McKay's Sense of Mediterranean Place; M.K.Walonen
The Shores of Aphrodite's Island: Cyprus and European Travel Memory; A.Eche
Jefferson's Ecologies of Exception: Geography, Race, and American Empire in the Age of Globalization; C.M.Battista

PART III: TRANSGRESSIONS, MOVEMENTS, BORDER CROSSINGS

Geopolitics, Landscape, and Guilt in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Literature; R.Weaver-Hightower
"Amid all the maze, uproar and novelty": The Limits of Other-Space in Sister Carrie; R.Collins
Furrowing the Soil With His Pen: Derek Walcott's Topography of the English Countryside; J.Johnson
Global Positioning from Spain: Mapping Identity in African American Narratives of Travel; M.C.Ramos
The Space of Transgression: A Geocritical Study of Albert Camus's "The Adulterous Wife"; B.La Juez
Affective Mapping in Lyric Poetry; H.Yeung

Index

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces



The English translation of Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism is now available. Click here for the official site.

Although time traditionally dominated the perspectives of the humanities and social sciences, space has reasserted itself in the contexts of postmodernity, postcolonialism, and globalization. Today, a number of emerging critical discourses connect geography, architecture, and environmental studies, among others to literature, film, and the mimetic arts. Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism explores these diverse fields, examines various theories of space and place, and proposes a new critical practice suitable for understanding our spatial condition today. Drawing on a wide array of theoretical and literary resources from around the globe and from antiquity to the present, Westphal argues for a geocritical approach to literary and cultural studies. This volume is an indispensible touchstone for those interested in the interactions between literature and space.

“The transdisciplinary spatial turn explodes globally in Geocriticism, a stunning literary tour-de-force that explores real and fictional spaces everywhere on earth. There is no one better than Westphal to interweave the Francophonic and Anglophonic geographical imaginations in ways that enhance our understanding of how geography and literature are critically related. This valuable translation opens the floodgates to European spatial thinking, while at the same time building creatively on the critical geographical literature available in English.”--Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA

“When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space.”--John Protevi, Professor of French Studies, Louisiana State University