Literary Cartography: An Overlapping Territory of Spatial Literary Studies and Narratology

Abstract

Abstract: “Literary Cartography” is an important concept advocated by Robert T. Tally Jr., a leading scholar in the field of spatial literary studies in the US. Using the making of maps as a metaphor for literary writing, especially the creative representation accomplished through narrative, this concept reveals that writing and other literary activities attempt to not only map the connection between subjectivity and a broader spatiotemporal totality, but also explore how literature represents and constructs the totality. Literary cartography is both the core of Spatial Literary Studies and a major expansion in Narratological studies. Firstly, it embodies the fundamental connection between mapping, narrative, and human existence; secondly, the studies of literary cartography stress narrative maps / mapping, including the “real” tangible maps and the narrative mapping with words, which may involve various modes, discourses, and points of view of mapping; thirdly, it can be employed to explore the narrative form / mode and the mapping characteristics of a certain text, author, time period or genre. The theory of literary cartography not only discusses and discloses the methodological, epistemological, and ontological significance and value of narrative spatiality on the one hand and, on the other, stresses the ideology of narrative forms / modes and even narrative itself.

Key words: Literary Cartography, Robert T. Tally Jr., narrative mapping, narrative form /mode, ideology

Fang Ying. Literary Cartography: An Overlapping Territory of Spatial Literary Studies and Narratology[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2020, 42(2): 39-51.

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