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Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Space, Henri Lefebvre tells us, is a tool for thought and action. Space enables and space constrains. Alongside history and metrics like race, class, and gender, space demands our attention as a foundational feature of social production and struggle. In the decades following Lefebvre's provocatively suggestive text The Production of Space, interest in spatial studies has burgeoned across academia, and literary studies are no exception. Though still relatively nascent, spatial literary studies has already been established on firm ground by works like Robert Tally's Spatiality and Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. These and other writers have already made a strong case for the necessity and usefulness of spatially- or geographically-focused criticism as a way to enunciate "the dialectical nature of the relations between texts and their real-world referents" (Prieto). Yet as Tally suggests, geocriticism is a heterogeneous field, and even as Westphal's groundbreaking text lays out a detailed analytical method, it also "invites others to engage in a debate" about the nature and practices of spatial literary studies (Tally 2-3). By way of further developing the methods and conceptual tools of geocriticism, I intend here to supplement the predominately postmodernist assumptions that have provided the basis for much geocriticism, notably Westphal's formative work. In particular, I want to challenge the tendency in such frameworks to dichotomize types of space in ways that privilege transgressive uncertainty over bounded emplacement. Refracted through the work of cultural geography and political ecology, transgression and boundedness become relational and dynamic concepts that are themselves not inherently liberatory or repressive, but are (as Lefebvre famously insisted) social products, equally subject to cooption and shaping by forces of power and resistance.

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