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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Dots, Lines, Areas and Words: Mapping Literature and Narration (With some Remarks on Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”)

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The so-called spatial turn of the humanities has led to an increasing interest in mapmaking. Looking at various trends in map-making the paper evaluates possible links and cooperation between cartography and literary studies. Differentiating between two central questions - which features of literature may be considered as spatial and in what way literature as a social practice could become spatially relevant – the paper argues that maps of literature should be based on specific features that constitute a literary text as opposed to other forms of art and discourse. Claiming that maps of literature should provide more than a visualisation of structure or an illustration of certain forms or content, the paper pleads for a general understanding about aims, terminology and standards of literary geography. As this requires a theory of space in literary texts, the paper distinguishes between various levels of spatiality in texts and different forms of constructing narrative space, suggesting outlines for future map-making of literary phenomena. Future endeavours of literary cartography and geography should refiect that in literature there is no space as such. Literary space is both sequential and discontinuous.