Flaneurie is boring as boring as can be –I’ve walked the whole damn cityand now it’s walking me

SUBLIME, DIRTY, AND MINE:

Re-Writing the City

The Geographic in Literary Studies:

Theory & Practice

A. Sharpe28 September 2010

• What do these two passages say about urban space? How does language here represent urban space, and to what effect? Any guesses where these passages come from?

1) A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (1859)

2) “Edmonton: Report tackles sex trade,” Edmonton Sun, Frank Landry, November 7, 2007

Guiding Questions

1. In English and literary studies, what does it mean to

read for ‘space’ and ‘place’?

2. What tools and theoretical methodologies can we

use to understand and analyze literary

representations of geographic spaces and places?

3. Why should the literary concern itself with the

spatial?

4. What does it mean to read place as text?

From Sherene H. Razack

As a scholar, what “one gains from geography must be clarified from the start.”

But “the risk, duly noted here, is that non-geographers are not well-qualified to engage in spatial theory. While we [the authors] acknowledge [...] partial and incomplete access to each discipline, we deliberately reject the boundaries created by them” (7).

(Race, Space and the Law, 2002)

Disciplinary Discourse Communities in the Humanities & Social Sciences

Human Geography

Literary Studies

Cultural Studies

Anthropology

History

SociologyPsychology

Languages

PhilosophyFilm Studies

Key Questions

• Across disciplines, what is the shared language of ‘space,’ ‘place’ and ‘the geographic’?

• Where do the disciplines diverge in the ways in which they speak about these concepts? What might account for these differences?

• How are these epistemological differences and/or ambiguities (not) explained within and between scholarly discourse communities?

Definitions: How I understand ‘space’ and ‘place’

• Space: includes the general, material locations and structures of daily life (your house, the library, downtown Waterloo)

• Place: connotes those local, particular spaces invested with personal meaning (my bedroom, our family cottage, the landscape of my childhood)

(From Domosh & Seager xix-xxiii)

Definitions: How I understand ‘space’ and ‘place’

• “Spaces come to be” – that is, they are produced or constituted, like psychosocial subjects

• Spaces do not “simply evolve” over time, or become ‘naturally’ filled with the material of everyday life (Razack 7-8, drawing upon Henri Lefebvre)

Definitions: How I understand ‘space’ and ‘place’

• Bodies, according to Foucault, are spatially regulated, and subjectivity takes shape through the demarcation and control of space (i.e. the ideal self-regulating subject inhabits only those ‘safe’ spaces and places of the bourgeois state) (Razack 10-11)

• The gendered, racialized, classed, and/or disabled body is regulated at numerous points of intersection

• Where might these ‘safe’ spaces be located? How does social regulation play out spatially?

Definitions: How I understand ‘space’ and ‘place’

• In The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), Michel de Certeau understands ‘space’ and ‘place’ as a set of concrete embodied and “intertwining” “practices” of daily life (94-96).

• Spaces and places are produced through our daily practices (eating, sleeping, walking in public)

• For de Certeau, these “spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life” (96).

Definitions: How I understand ‘space’ and ‘place’

• What happens when we extend de Certeau’s terms, and consider that these spatial practices specifically occur within the bounds of an exclusionary white “masculinist conceptual world” (Pohl 1-2), a world where gendered, racialized, classed – that is, marked - bodies are demarcated and regulated because of visible difference?

(From Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia, 1600-1800, 2006)

Pamela K. Gilbert: Literary Scholar

• Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida

• Several monographs on the Victorian body, disease, and in urban space in the nineteenth-century novel, including Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997); Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004); The Citizen’s Body (2007), and Cholera and Nation (2008)

Gilbert’s “Sex and the Modern City: English

studies and the spatial turn” (2009)

• Production of space: “both ideologically and physically” constituted (103)

• The representation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and the ambiguous continuum between these seemingly ‘separate spheres’

Gilbert’s “Sex and the Modern City: English studies and the spatial turn” (2009)

“[...] there is a tendency to think of both genders and places as sites of fixed identity, unchanging, with clear boundaries, and perhaps clear proprietary interests” (104).

Feminist Geographer Susan Stanford Friedman agrees:

• In Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998), Friedman writes that every “situation presumes a certain setting as site for the interplay of different axes of power and powerlessness” (23)

• A “rhetoric of spatiality,” “positionality” and displacement speaks directly to feminist preoccupations with “situational identity” (19-23): that is, who we are (as gendered subjects) is where we are

Gilbert: Key points cont’d.

• The city and urban space: the perennial “site, par excellence, of literary and cultural analyses of space in Western modernity” (105)

• Examples?

• How spaces and places are represented in literature, and how these literary representations, in turn, shape our understandings and perceptions of places (105-106)

• Examples?

Gilbert: Key points cont’d.

• Sex, flaneurie and urban voyeurism: the love of looking at the city, and consuming the landscape with the eyes

• How do women, and other marked bodies, inhabit this landscape of visual pleasure? What is like to always be surveilled?

Gilbert: Key points cont’d.

Gilbert: Key points cont’d.

• Urban space = grit, filth, disease = vice, moral corruption

• For women, cityscapes therefore become fearscapes: terrifying, predatory terrains

• What are we to think of a woman who willingly occupies urban space?

Gilbert: Key points cont’d.

• “In the twentieth century, even though the urban continues to be fraught with sexual dangers, especially for women, it is also the site of new freedoms [...] Sex, here, is both that which offers and defiles freedom and pleasure, with the doubling of the woman as subject” and “object” (Gilbert 115-116)

• HBO’s Sex and the City (1998-2004; 2008 feature film) as Gilbert’s example

Practice: Re-Writing Kitchener

• “Michel de Certeau showed how the practice of space, the experience of following itineraries within the urban space, was a process of reading, perhaps even of writing” (Gilbert 107)

• So, what might this practice look like in textual form?

Practice: Re-Writing Kitchener

“Kitchenerite sublime" • How can I rewrite the Kitchener cityscape in order to

deconstruct the “conservative discourse that [has] constructed the central city as an object of middle-class fear”? (Macek qtd. in Gilbert 111)

• How can I re-inscribe the decaying post-industrial landscape of this south-western Ontario city with an aesthetics which is at once resistant and benign?

‘Infinity’

‘Succession and Uniformity’

‘Smell and Taste. Bitters and Stenches’

Final Considerations

• What would it mean to re-write your urban space? What would your practice entail?

• Questions?

The

The

Works CitedBurke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful (1757). Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, translated and edited by Steven Rendall.

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: The University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Domosh, Mona & Joni Seager. Putting Women in Place: Women Geographers Make Sense of the

World. New York: The Guilford Press, 2001. Print.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter.

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Print.

Gilbert, Pamela K. “Sex and the Modern City: English studies and the spatial turn.” The Spatial

Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Eds. Barney Warf and Santa Arias. London and New

York: Routledge, 2009. 102-121. Print.

Pohl, Nicole. Women, Space and Utopia, 1600-1800. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited,

2006. Print.

Razack, Sherene H. Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Ed. Sherene

H. Razack. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002. Print.