Unnatural Temporalities and Projected Places in Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2

Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2 (1967) belongs to his first period of play writing. In this phase, his works exhibit experimental, remote, impossible narrative/fictional worlds that are overwhelmingly abstract, exhibiting “abrupt shifts of focus and tone” (Wetzsteon 1984, 4). Shepard’s unusual theatrical literary cartography is commensurate with his depiction of unnatural temporalities, in that, although the stage is bare, with almost no props, the postmodernist/metatheatrical conflated timelines and projected (impossible) places in the characters’ imagination mutually reflect and inflect each other. Employing Jan Alber’s reading strategies in his theorization of unnatural narratology and Barbara Piatti’s concept of projected places, this essay proposes a synthetic approach so as to naturalize the unnatural narratives and storyworlds in Shepard’s play.

Literary Geographies in Balzac and Proust

Literary geography is one of the core aspects of the study of the novel, both in its realist and post-realist incarnations. Literary geography is not just about connecting place-names to locations on the map; literary geographers also explore how spaces interact in fictional worlds and the imaginary of physical space as seen through the lens of characters' perceptions. The tools of literary cartography and geographical analysis can be particularly useful in seeing how places relate to one another and how characters are associated with specific places. This Element explores the literary geographies of Balzac and Proust as exemplary of realist and post-realist traditions of place-making in novelistic spaces. The central concern of this Element is how literary cartography, or the mapping of place-names, can contribute to our understanding of place-making in the novel.

LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY: MAP AS A PARATEXTUAL ELEMENT IN BRITISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Объект исследования данной статьи – литературная карта как визуальный элемент детской книги на рубеже XIX–XX веков – малоизученная область визуальной культуры детства. Карта становится важной составляющей визуальной культуры детства во второй половине XIX века. Целью исследования было проследить становление картографической традиции в детской литературе Великобритании. Для достижения поставленной цели потребовалось, во-первых, изучить ведущие современные направления в изучении литературной карты. Во-вторых, сформировать терминологический аппарат для описания карты как документального и эстетического объекта в рамках литературного произведения, который в силу малой изученности отсутствует в русском языке. В-третьих, описать пять литературных карт из классических произведений британской детской литературы Золотого периода в их взаимодействии с текстом. В результате работы автор приходит к выводу, что, являясь важным паратекстуальным элементом детской книги, эти карты представляют различные типы взаимодействия с основным текстом: карта-сюжет, карта-документ эпохи, карта-рассказчик, карта-память. Since one of the first representations of the Earth in “The Map Psalter”, marine maps from the Age of Discovery and the first literary atlases, maps have held a special place in British culture. Since the map of the Treasure Island, which is considered to be a pioneer of the kind, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same name, maps have always played a significant role in British children’s literature. A literary map, especially a map in children’s books, is an important paratextual element. Although the roles and functions of maps may vary greatly, the place of a map (most frequently it is an endpaper or a frontispiece) makes literary cartography the first visual element for the reader, which enables a map to set the setting, genre, and particular audience expectations. The fact that it is not an obligatory element of a book makes the presence of a map in a book an essential part of the author’s artistic vision and a key (para)textual element of the book. The five maps from the classic books written for younger readers between 1883 and 1926 may prove that maps perform multiple functions and play a greater role than that of beautiful drawings on frontispieces. The maps are the 17th-century marine map of the imaginary island from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island; the actual map of India from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim; the map of Kensington Gardens presumably drawn by a child from James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens; the map of the Thames Valley inhibited by anthropomorphic animals from Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. The analysis of these maps’ paratextual powers and textual-visual interactions leads to the conclusion that the five literary maps from the classic children’s books of the Golden Age period reveal the five potential ways of interaction between the textual and the visual: map as a plot device, map as a document, map as a narrator, map as the transcendent, and map as memory, correspondingly. The conclusion poses the following questions: What happens to maps during the act of translation from English into Russian or any other language? Is it possible to translate cartography? How crucial is the omission of a map? The answers to these questions are yet to be discovered.

Hand Grenades in the Kitchen: a commentary on The Murenger and Other Stories and Rebel Rebel

The published works being submitted, The Murenger and Other Stories and Rebel Rebel are, respectively, collections of 15 and 21 short stories. They form part of a substantial body of almost ninety short stories, gathered in five collections over three decades by the author. They represent a contribution to the short story in both English and Welsh and offer evidence of experiment with the form. The critical review examines some of the technical aspects of crafting these short stories and considers some of the disparate themes in these volumes, such as Brexit, nature and David Bowie. It also sets the collections within the context of both the writer’s other outputs and the work of other authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike and Kevin Barry whose influence has made its mark. It also considers issues arising from being a bilingual writer and applies some ideas about literary cartography to the two volumes under consideration.

The Literary Cartography of Ruins

After air raids destroyed much of London’s landscape, there were attempts at not only material but imaginative reconstruction. Books of photographs comparing London’s landmarks before and after ruination were made; maps of ‘ruin-walks’ were created for tourists to follow; and new editions of past histories of London were reissued without incorporating present-day damage, as if to elide and erase the wartime years. The intersection between memory and ruins is of primordial concern in a post-war Bildungsroman by Rose Macaulay, whose young protagonist remains unable to assimilate into her post-war landscape. Through the chronotope of ruin, Chapter 9 explores how Macaulay combines London’s landscape with that of her character’s traumatized childhood in Vichy France. In doing so, she explores the limits of the Bildungsroman, in its emphasis on individual-social formation, as a genre for the post-war world.

Mapping the End: On Monsters and Maps in the Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation is a map of the end time. Its apocalyptic story is full of monsters, from the throne room to the abyss. Using new studies in literary cartography and spatiality studies, I argue that the text of Revelation can be read as a map, and that it is itself a monster.

The city and the beloved witness: Mapping cityscapes of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry

The reputation of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, as a poet of exile is well established. Much of his poetry deals with themes of loss, lamentation, and longing where he speaks in a powerful voice about the plight of people of Kashmir. Shahid’s personal memories are not only of Kashmir but also of Delhi, the city where he was born, studied, taught, and published his first collection of poems. In his poems about Delhi he revisits both old Delhi and New Delhi: he roams around the city, listens to Qawwali at Saint Nizamuddin’s mausoleum, meets Muslim butchers, remembers his parents, remembers Shahjahan, and recites Bahadur Shah Zafar’s poem. This article investigates the representations and recollections of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poems and explores the city’s centrality in understanding socio-cultural history, the importance of particular individuals, and spatial specificity. It studies how the poet explores the city in relation to its languages, histories (the Rebellion of 1857, Partition, post-Partition), and cultures (Mughal and modern). I further investigate how Ali’s literary cartography of Delhi is influenced both by indigenous genres such as Shehr Ashob and the modern English poetic tradition, and how certain Indo-Islamic tropes become central to the poet’s literary memorialization of India’s capital city.

Maps of Literary Trails in Thessaloniki

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The work presented here is an approach on the subject of Literary Cartography, which deals with the topic of space in Literature as well as with the relationships that are formed between the literary and the real world. The aim of the work was to make the subject of Literary Cartography more widely known in the Greek academic circles. It was developed in the framework of a Diploma Thesis at the Laboratory of Cartography &amp;amp; Geographical Analysis (<i>CartoGeoLab</i>), Department of Rural and Surveying Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering of the Aristotle University (Thessaloniki, Greece) in collaboration with the School of Philology of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Aristotle University.</p><p>Literary Cartography has a long tradition dating back to centuries ago, and yet it is only rather recently that researchers started using maps as tools to analyse and interpret pieces of literary work, as well as to reach conclusions which would have been impossible without the help of cartographic material. While maps were initially used solely as complimentary additions to books, like helping the reader with the visualization of the geography of a novel, this is starting to no longer be the case. With the advent of the digital age and the GIS technologies, cartographers are not just presented with new challenges but also with new opportunities to further research previously unexplored aspects of Cartography. With the rise of digital technologies, which can deal with the complexities of literary space, maps are no longer just descriptive tools, but they can be used as guides to reach new conclusions.</p><p>The work resulted in a series of twelve (12) thematic maps, illustrating the literary geography of the works of ten Greek writers, whose stories take place in the city of Thessaloniki in Greece.</p>