Description
"Traversing the Space of Literature: Reading in Three Dimensions"This paper is concerned not so much with the spaces within literature, but rather with the space of literature, opposing the view of the text as a temporal medium, sequential, successive and linear, a view held by those such as Gotthold Lessing, with that of critics such as Joseph Frank, who describe the text in spatial terms, speaking of simultaneity and juxtaposition. The paper will develop a particular understanding of the space of literature, moving from the physical spatiality of the text as the printed word on the page, to the more abstract textual space created through the semantic and phonetic inter-connections within the text. The process by which this space is constructed will be described by employing Roman Jakobson's bipolar structure of language involving the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, which sees the textual network formed from the horizontal line of contiguity and oblique lines linking points of 'positional' similarity within the text.
The second part of the paper will explore the nature of the reader's experience of the text through an analysis of Paul Auster's City of Glass from The New York Trilogy. Here, Auster creates a text within a text as his characters take letter-shaped walks through the streets of the city of New York. In this way, Auster draws parallels between the text and the city landscape within the text, portraying both the act of writing and of reading as a movement through space, and illustrating the tension between temporality and spatiality, sequentiality and simultaneity. Interestingly, Auster also attempts to situate this literary space in relation to our own reality, and it is with this that the paper ends, with the possibility that the space of literature is, ultimately, not simply an abstract place of textuality, but an extension and continuation of our social reality.
| Period | 1998 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Cork, IrelandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Paul Auster
- Spatiality
- Textuality