Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Literary criticism now has several decades of intense research on spatiality behind it. Yet it was only with the paradigm shift of the so-called "spatial turn" (Soja 1989: 39; Jameson 1991: 154) that new ideas regarding the interrelation of space as both conceived and perceived, the dialectics of space and place, and the significance of both to human experience, began to be systematically developed (see Foucault 1984; Lefebvre 2000; Relph 1976; Detering et al. 2012: Lotman 1972; Bachtin 2008). The central premise of much of this work is that space and place are produced through a dialectical interaction of our practical experience of place with our mental conceptions thereof (cf. Relph 1976). It is important to note, however, that literary studies (at least on the continent) have generally failed to take into account both sides of this dialectic (space as a mental and physical entity). By focusing on the translation of cognitive space alone into literature, literary criticism has tended to omit actually perceived, real-life geographical space, thus rendering impossible an understanding of "lived space" (Lefebvre 2000) [i].
Repository Citation
Kröger, Julia. "Zola’s Spatial Explorations of Second Empire Paris." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–23. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss3/9