COMPLIT 248 Literature, Cartography, and the Spatial Turn from Homer to Claire Coleman

Faculty: Katharina Piechocki
Location: Dana Palmer 102 (FAS)
Time: Th 12pm-2:45pm

What is the impact of space, geography, and mapping not only on the study of literature, but also on the  writing process itself? By bringing cartography and the spatial turn in dialogue with comparative literature this seminar asks: what can be gained when literary texts are read “cartographically,” with an emphasis on the tension between narrative and spatial imaginary? How does the question of border, place, and territory articulate itself in literary texts and emerge as one of literature’s principal challenges? How does the spatial turn not only reevaluate modes of visualization and strategies of mapping, but also redirect comparative literature? This seminar does not take maps and keywords such as place, space, and location as fixed categories, but as malleable and ever-changing processes to understand, create, and challenge the world. We will discuss maps alongside texts from Antiquity to the 21st century and focus, among others, on questions such as exile, contested territories, the environment, insularity, underwater optics, poetics, style, utopia, (post-)apocalyptic spaces, and heterotopia. Texts and authors include Homer, Plato, the Bible, Ptolemy, Macrobius, Ibn Khurradādhbih, an anonymous 11th-century Egyptian Book of Curiosities, Christopher Columbus, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Aphra Behn, Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, Jamaica Kincaid, Wisława Szymborska, Charles Olson, Mia Couto, and Claire Coleman. Visits to Harvard’s Houghton and Pusey (Map) Libraries are an intrinsic part of the course.