cultural geography and the place of literary

8/14/2019 Cultural Geography and the Place of Literary

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/cultural-geography-and-the-place-of-literary 1/25

Cultural Geography and the Place of the LiteraryAuthor(s): Sara BlairSource: American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 544-567Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/490111

Accessed: 19/11/2009 05:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/stable/490111?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/490111?origin=JSTOR-pdf



Cultural Geography a n d th e

P l a c e o f th e LiterarySara Blair

Justice, Nature and theGeography of DifferenceBy David HarveyBasil Blackwell, 1996

BodySpace.DestabilizingGeographies of Genderand SexualityEdited by Nancy Duncan

Routledge, 1996

Thirdspace. Journeys toLos Angeles and OtherReal-and-ImaginedPlacesBy Edward SojaBasil Blackwell, 1996

Mapping AmericanCulture

Edited by WayneFranklin and MichaelSteinerUniversity of Iowa Press,1992

All Over the Map:Rethinking AmericanRegionsEdited by Edward Ayers,Patricia Nelson

Limerick, StephenNissenbaum, and PeterS. OnufJohns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1996

The EnvironmentalImagination: Thoreau,Nature Writing, and the

It is old news, in the shadow of the millennium, that weinhabit a posthistorical era. Over the last two decades, a constel-lation of texts and scholars drawing on cultural theory, anthro-pology, sociology, and philosophy has not only declared that his-tory as god-term is dead, but that temporality as the organizingform of experience has been superseded by spatiality, the af-fective and social experience of space. Preeminent Marxist intel-lectuals concede that it is now space rather than time that hidesconsequences from us, raising the "omni-present danger that ourmental maps no longer match current realities" (Harvey, Condi-tion 306; see also Soja, Postmodern Geographies 1; Berger 40);anthropologists and feminist theorists remind us that theorytravels, knowledges are situated, subjects localized, communitiesand public spheres diasporic and globalized. In the face of theinsistent effects, material and hyperreal, of postindustrial econo-mies and "global cities" (Sassen), cultural theorists exhort theirreaders "[t]o recognise space, to recognise what 'takes place'there and what it is used for" (Lefebvre, Survival 17). To para-phrase a well-known spaceman, American pop icon James Tibe-rius Kirk, space is indeed the final frontier.

Edward Soja, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, Henri Lefeb-vre: the thinkers I cite, along with others more and less familiarto readers in American studies, have been instrumental in inau-gurating a field-or rather, a shared rubric and set of concerns-often called the new cultural geography. Revisiting problems intraditional geography (roughly, the study of the distribution ofthe physical, biological, and cultural aspects of the earth's sur-

face), the new geography is rooted in Marxist cultural critique,French structuralism, and English political economy; its analytictools are being adapted from sociology, urban studies, and cul-tural studies.' Unifying its diverse expressions is a shared project:the articulation of space as a social product, one that masks theconditions of its own formation. Its practitioners aim not onlyto unmask these contradictions but also to elaborate space inthe abstract, as well as specific places, as sites where individuals



American Literary History

negotiate definitively social relations:2 between labor and man-agement, immigrant and native, regional and global, dominantand other, private and state-controlled. Consequently, the newcultural geography maps affective terrain along with economicand demographic flows; it covers the ground of spatial practicesranging from the construction of suburban fortresses to the plea-sures of the theme park, from the privatization of playgroundsto the uses of mass culture by deterritorialized workers. In a veryreal sense, the new geography constitutes a powerful expressive

form, giving voice to the effects of dislocation, disembodiment,and localization that constitute contemporary social orders.Given its interests in narrative-that is, in the way domi-

nant narratives conceal the constructedness of space and itseffects-and in specifically American sites of space-formation,the new geography is far less familiar to Americanist literary crit-ics than it should be. To be sure, a vanguard has joined the marchon space, however sparse their numbers by contrast with histori-ans. The program for the 1997 American Studies Associationconvention listed no fewer than 25 panels alluding-howeverloosely or figuratively-to geography, mapping, or space. Cata-logs from trendy Routledge and Verso feature studies of litera-ture and spatial politics, literature and urban form, the built envi-ronment as social text. And a growing number of texts seek toreframe disciplinary conversations about cultural identity, thehomeland, regionalism, and the social body with respect to geog-raphy's revaluation of space and the social practices it informs.The new geography has arrived, it would seem, just in time tovitiate or even resolve a felt crisis in literary studies, opening upa vast realm of objects and practices to be staked out for criti-cal prospecting.

Rather than tumble headlong into this scholarly gold rush,I want to offer a more considered account of the transdisciplin-ary and theoretical possibilities it opens. Although accounts ofthe new geography and its aims proliferate, none has mappedits shared interests with American studies insofar as the latterconcerns literary texts, literary history, and literary historiogra-phy. In the essay that follows, I want to chart that unstable terri-

tory. Such cartography may be suspect: incomplete, provisional,interested. But it is nonetheless crucial, for each field of inquiry,I argue, encompasses habits, histories, a mode of attention, fromwhich the other can richly profit. Cultural geography providespowerful new models and vocabularies for revisiting certain de-finitive (and apparently intractable) problems in American liter-ary studies, long perched on a hotly contested border betweenliterature and culture, the aesthetic and the social. In turn, the

Formation of AmericanCultureBy Lawrence BuellHarvard University Press,1995

The Geography ofIdentityEdited by PatriciaYaegerUniversity of Michigan

Press, 1996

Although accounts of thenew geography and itsaims proliferate, none hasmapped its sharedinterests with Americanstudies insofar as thelatter concerns literarytexts, literary history, andliterary historiography.... Cultural geographyprovides powerful new

models and vocabulariesfor revisiting certaindefinitive (and apparentlyintractable) problems inAmerican literary studies,long perched on a hotlycontested border betweenliterature and culture, theaesthetic and the social.

545



546 Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary

latter offers theorists of space and place specific reading practicesand canons that richly affirm the materiality and texture of spa-tial experience. For readers of culture with widely divergent aims,the encounter between geography and literary history holds outthe possibility for more intimate and more precise understand-ings of human praxis and of imaginative productions as socialforces.

1. What in the World Is the New Geography?

For a good many literary scholars, the field of traditionalgeography-to say nothing of its radical or "new" articula-tions-is something of a foreign country. My personal introduc-tion to the discipline was made in a suburban northern Virginiagrade school after a family move from New York City. Openingmy first geography text, I was captivated by its lurid frontispiece:an obsequious Walter Raleigh laying down a fur-trimmed cape,smutched with decidedly primal earth (of the New World?), fora highly glamorous Elizabeth I. The encounter is evocative of thenew geography's diverse concerns. What are the effects of dislo-cation governing this scene of reading-from urban to subur-ban, between distinct US regions with markedly different govern-ing narratives of their shared history, from armed aggression todisarming fealty? What conditions-of labor, migration, milita-rism, cultural exchange, linguistic translation, syncretism-canbe traced in the history of the furred cape, at once synecdochefor colonization and product of the work of human bodies? How

does this image, allegorizing the inexorable spread of empire andits mastery of spatial conditions, function to conceal preciselythat human labor? And what claims does the image imply forcolonialist space/place as the ground of contemporary or ongo-ing national identity?

These questions can be taken, however reductively, o repre-sent some of the most contested areas of inquiry shaping andbeing shaped by the new geography. Following, often critically,on the late work of Michel Foucault-that is, such scattershot

essays and interviews as "Questions on Geography" (1976) and"Of Other Spaces" (1986)-the historicist mode of cultural ge-ography focuses on the production of spaces, simultaneously ma-terial and abstract, that have functioned as arenas for the enact-ment of social relations: the penitentiary and theater, the NewEngland village, the Rover auto plant, the colony and homeland.3Revisiting such historically sedimented sites for the productionand reproduction of colonial, early modern, and industrial social



American Literary History 547

orders, ultural geographers ave concerned hemselves with notonly "the great strategies of geopolitics" but also "the little tac-tics of the habitat" Foucault, "Eye" 149)-the intimate prac-tices of emplacement, mbodiment, and location through whichsubjects, communities, and nations are bounded and bound to-gether. As my example suggests, however, he new geographyputs stress on circuits of production and consumption-of im-ages as well as goods-and on nodes of human contact and ex-change. It thus countervails gainst what geographer David Har-

vey has called the "pure dealism" f much contemporary heory,redirecting our attention to "the concrete historical and geo-graphical onditions n which human action unfolds" Justice 8).In the wake of cultural studies, historicist, and other models ofreading hat have tended to make fetishes of fluxes and flows onthe one hand and monolithic hegemonies or "powers" n theother, cultural geographers ave worked o articulate new waysof getting real (Foucault, "Eye" 149).

If my anecdote traces the isomorphism of cultural studiesand postcolonial studies with the new geography, t also outlinesthe latter as a privileged ield of inquiry nto the present: thestudy of what has come to be called postmodernity and itsunique spatiotemporal ffects. n Fredric ameson's ontroversialbut widely nfluential ccount, the contemporary patial order sa distinctly bewildering disorder, an array of places and scalesthat "has finally succeeded n transcending he capacities of theindividual human body to locate itself" (44). Virtually schizo-phrenic or rather, virtual and schizophrenic) n their effect, thepublic spaces of contemporaneity onstitute a historically mer-

gent form of space-time; hey instantiate as they symbolicallyexpress he monolithic, abstract power with which transnationalcapital lows, eradicating ultural, geophysical, and phenomeno-logical boundaries. Here and now, n the vaunted ourth stage ofworld capitalism, all that is solid has indeed melted nto air; theground plans, urban grids, and built structures of our publicspaces have become virtually unnavigable, s conceptual mapspredicated n clear distinctions between outside and inside, pub-lic and private, authentic and themed, become ever ess relevant.4

While the new geography as been instrumental o theoret-ical narratives of this "symptomatic" patiality (Jameson 413;see also Massey, "Politics"; oja, Postmodern; arvey, Urban), talso seeks to nuance them more fully-that is, to recognize hatits own formulations f a simulacral, hyperreal, depthless spacein which all experience ongeals tend to drain he affective xpe-rience of postmodernity of specific meaning on the local scale.Feminist geographers, rominent mong them Linda McDowell,



548 Cultural Geography nd the Place of the Literary

Nancy Duncan, and Gillian Rose, have gone on to explore thedifferential effects of globalization, the "radical inequalities inthe spatial spread of individuals' lives" (Duncan 31), from thebodily experience of cyberspace to the varied meanings of suchostensibly shared spaces as shopping malls and work sites (Ma-zey and Lee 37-50). In the introduction to his study of the cul-tural dimensions of globalization, Arjun Appadurai considersthe shifting relations between mobile mass consumer goods andthe diasporic communities they invade and create; recalling the

force of "embodied sensation" awakened by the smell of RightGuard, the drama of Hollywood B-films screened in Bombay, heconcludes that the vaunted effects of postmodern space-time-its compression, its simultaneity, its instability-open up possi-bilities for new spatial and social practices even as they rendertraditional modes of location obsolete (1-2). Eschewing the plea-sures of postmodernspeak-irony, camp, the simulacral-fortheir own sake, the most productive mappers of postmodernityseek to open that discourse to a kind of ethnography, one thatconsiders the effects of late stage capitalism on the ground andclose in. Their work embraces lived dislocations rather than ram-pant dysfunctionality, the felt differences made by rapid shifts inspatial scales rather than a sterile jargon that has been dubbed"globaloney" (Harvey, Justice 1).

My far-too-brief survey of this field that is not a field (thereis, for example, no "cultural geography" section in that steadybarometer of the academic zeitgeist, Manhattan's downtownBarnes and Noble) necessarily passes in silence over other con-tributory disciplines. Most glaringly absent is urban studies, as

well as urban planning, architectural theory, and feminist theory,each of which has loaned the new geography founding thinkers,frames of reference, and vocabulary.5 But for my purposes here itwill suffice if I have called attention to the prominence of literarytheoretical discourses in space studies. As the new geography de-fines its own boundaries and explores its own formations, it hasincreasingly sought inspiration in the realm of what can beloosely circumscribed as literary theory. From bell hooks, CelesteOlalquiaga, Gloria Anzalduia, and Edward Said-celebrated

figures of "marginality" Soja, Thirdspace 4) who define the con-tours of "an-Other" (5) form of spatial awareness-to poststruc-turalist representations of the convolutions of "nested" space(Smith 72-73) and various readings of the schizophrenic, alien,or cyborg body, geographers have adapted literary theory's criti-cal postures and questions as well as its utopian fantasies of radi-cal openness and renewal.6 In Justice, Nature, and the Geographyof Difference (1996), the latest in a remarkable sequence of texts




that can be said to chart the convergence of Marxist critique,urban theory, and literary theory, David Harvey agrees that thelast has thoroughly "permeate[d] social theory," offering a pow-erful resource for countering entrenched forms of postivism (47).At the same time, however, Harvey warns that a tidal "wave ofphilosophizing in literary theory" threatens to erode the embed-dedness of cultural geography-and indeed of all cultural cri-tique-in the lived lives of individuals and communities (7).Concern with the latter, he suggests, needs to be wrested awayfrom the often

turgid (and self-serving)rhetorics of

"poststruc-turalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and the like" (1), frominvocations "of space, place, and environment (nature) as conve-nient metaphors" (46).7 At this moment in the emergence of thenew space studies, then, the question becomes urgent: what pre-cisely do literary critics and historians, no less than theorists,have to contribute to new understandings of spatial practices, ofthe production of spatial and social differences, and of space,time, and nature as material frames for everyday life?

2. Common Places: Geography and American Studies at theCrossroads

As the old line goes, funny they should ask. American stud-ies scholars have a vested interest in the new space studies aslong-standing models and vocabularies of cultural analysis be-come increasingly inadequate to the project of reading (let alonetransforming) contemporary cultural life. If, as Amy Kaplan and

Donald Pease have persuasively argued in their introduction toCultures of United States Imperialism (1993), founding ideas ofthe nation-the one Nation, with its origin myths, its regions,its unitary political shape-have long been superseded by therealities of the US as an imperialist world state with shiftingboundaries and hegemonic effects, that idiom has in turn re-vealed itself to be anachronistic, too inelastic to address the com-plex orders and processes it invokes.8 With respect to their forma-tion and effects, cultural geography has productively synthesized

more nuanced rhetorics; it articulates conditions of diaspora andcultural diffusion, of borderlands and exurbia, of the "militantparticularity" of experience on the local scale (Williams, Re-sources 249; Harvey, Justice 32-34). Conversely, even as Ameri-canist literary scholars profit from greater fluency in this idiom,they also bring particular disciplinary resources to bear on ques-tions of identity, location, the phenomenology of space, and theproblems of representing spatial experience. In what follows, I




consider two recent anthologies that engage the new geographyfrom different disciplinary perspectives and with quite differentmotives. Neither is primarily authored by or intended for geogra-phers, traditional or radical; both evidence the productive dislo-cations that ensue from genuinely transdisciplinary thinking.Read in conjunction, the two volumes allow me to survey thecommon ground between Americanist literary studies and thenew geography, as well as some of the ways in which each mightserve as a resource for revaluating the entrenched terms and in-

terpretive habits-the commonplaces-of the other.By any account, American studies has a special if delicatepurchase on space as a historical and theoretical problem. InMapping American Culture (1992), a ground-breaking volumeof essays about "space and place" as "the taken-for-grantedgroundwork of American culture" (3) Wayne Franklin and Mi-chael Steiner remind us that the history of American studies itselfcan be mapped as a series of investigations into "the spatial di-mensions of American experience" (11). From Frederick JacksonTurner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History(1893) to Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950), from AnnetteKolodny's The Lay of the Land (1975) through the current boomin new western history, American studies has been preoccupied,if not downright obsessed, with the relation of national experi-ence and identity to "the geocultural conditions of the NewWorld" (11). For literary scholars, however, a certain disciplinaryshame attends this history, which can also be described as a seriesof debunkings of literary critical narratives of space: the closingof the frontier as the grounds of American soul making; the mythof the heroic (and homosocial) frontiersman; the elevation ofwestering as social project over dwelling, of men's territories overfeminized civilization; the advocacy of a canon whose erasure ofindigenous and nonwhite peoples and cultures echoes their massdestruction in the name of manifest destiny. Traditional catego-ries of US space and place-nature, region, landscape, pastoral,the frontier-had until recently been so discredited that literaryscholars had virtually abandoned them. But as the work of histo-rians engaged with cultural geography or geography in its revi-

sionist historical forms makes acutely clear, these traditional cat-egories are crucial to the writing of American material andexperiential histories, and they continue powerfully to mediatecontemporary social relations and acts of emplacement.9

Mapping American Culture exhibits a healthy interest in theforms of this mediation. Only by revisiting founding, if not foun-dational, notions and ideologies of space, Franklin and Steinerargue, can we fully understand an ongoing "national culture as




profoundly ituated .. and materialized" 12). The contributorsrichly demonstrate hat attention o traditional patial orms en-ables a recovery of the agency of ordinary Americans making doin the era of postmodernity; hey are seen not only submitting obut also constructively dapting the banal landscapes of post-industrial consumerism, he threatening emptiness of the newurban wasteland.10 n a study of black gospel singing n Brook-lyn, Harlem, and the South Bronx, Ray Allen documents he in-strumentality or urban accommodation of the idea of region,

of affiliation with a material and figurative Southern homeland.For working-class black men and women generations emovedfrom he rural South, Allen argues, ropes of "back home" remaina powerful resource in the project of "bring[ing] meaningfulorder to the northern, secular, urban environment" 130, 133).In a different ontext, Timothy Davis reminds us of the variablemeanings of land, landscape, place, and nature for underem-ployed, outsourced, and otherwise dislocated Americans. His in-terpretive history of US "cultural andscape photography" ul-minates in a discussion of postmodernist photographers whodocument such deprivileged ultural forms as the trailer park,the barrio, and the mass-produced nvironment 191-230). En-gaging heir subjects' varied uses and perceptions f such Ameri-can sites, these texts exemplify he larger aims of the new geogra-phy; hey frame he meaning of place not as a matter of intrinsicor dominant cultural value but of experiential istory.

At large, Mapping American Culture suggests how interpre-tive practices central o American tudies can give intimacy andtexture o the discourse of spatiality. t also suggests how useful

the thought habits of geography might be brought to bear oncertain sites of literary ritical contention and impasse. Take, orexample, hat first ground of American space and place, natureitself. Openly committed to an activist ecocriticism, one thatwould redirect our attention from "how culture forms us" to"what our culture is doing, quite tangibly, o our earth" (16),Franklin and Steiner nsist on a distinction between space orplace as abstract category and "authentic" material place, thatof a nature or wilderness whose protection will redeem human

beings (or at least the "breed" of Americans) rom their ownwaste and greed (John Graves, qtd. in Franklin and Steiner 7).As the new geography eminds us, however, hat distinction

remains profoundly problematic Duncan 57-58); t is especiallyso for American tudies. On that disciplinary errain, capaciousand varied as it has become, it remains surprisingly ifficult othink about first grounds-the material geography f the US-without recourse o the same mythologizing hetorics of space




and the nation that Franklin and Steiner seek to put in historicalcontext. They thus describe the aim of their volume as revisionof "the greatest [social] construction of all-the one that makesus accept without question that we are, inescapably, children ofthe hearth rather than the land" (16), and they imagine the his-tory of American space and spaces as a "dialectic" between "thethrill of the open road and the certainty of home, . .. migrationand habitation, innovation and tradition" (4). The essays thatfollow abundantly reveal such categories-hearth, land, the

road, home-as highly mobile, resistant to mapping as materialspaces, and they sit in uneasy relation to Franklin and Steiner'sclaim that the dialectic in question (itself a commonplace of tra-ditional American studies) constitutes some irreducible "Ameri-can character" (David Lowenthal, qtd. in Franklin and Steiner6), an "American landscape" in the figurative and symbolicsenses (D. H. Lawrence, qtd. in Franklin and Steiner 7). Thatclaim typifies the problem with nature or environment as inter-pretive object: however "authentic" or irreducible it may be, itsentanglement with an evolving imaginative production of "land-scapes lost" and "paradise paved" needs to be assiduously unrav-eled (Ayers et al. 3).11Understandably, what Franklin and Steinerseek is a language for talking meaningfully about how referentand signifier in American discourses of nature have been mutu-ally productive of one another-how land, landscape, environ-ment, and place have shaped historically particular phenomenol-ogies, productive practices, imaginative and cultural forms. If theturn to cultural studies they reject fails to provide such models,the new geography does not. Its flexible, nuanced attention to

such felt permanences as nature and to their social uses and his-tories is a resource of enormous potential for readers of theAmerican scene; failing to profit from that example, we not onlymiss opportunities to historicize more carefully but risk lapsingback into unexamined tautologies of place and identity, into vir-tual characterology.'2

I adverted above to the changing fortunes of another tradi-tional category of US spatiality, the region; here we can alreadysee the salutary effects of engagement with spatial theory for

American literary studies. In a remarkably far-reaching essay onSarah Orne Jewett and the problems raised for literary historicalscholarship by local color fiction, June Howard adapts new geo-graphical thinking to dislodge entrenched commonplaces of re-gionalism, cultural hierarchy, and periodization. Building on An-thony Giddens's work on place as a geographically specific site ofsocial activity that produces itself and its defining social relationsthrough "face-to-face interactions" (The Consequences of Mo-




dernity 1990]), Howard dentifies as central to Jewett's iction aconcern with "circuits of exchange" hat both joins and resiststhe postbellum project of rebuilding he corporate-capitalist a-tion (372). Howard s careful o acknowledge he locatedness ofJewett's oncerns n a race- and class-bound habitus, n a well-defined "literary-social orl[d]" n Richard Brodhead's ense ofthe term (Brodhead 5). But her engagement with new geographi-cal models enables Howard o insist on the multiple ocial reali-ties inhering n that affective and productive world: within its

lived space, she argues, he realities of class hierarchy re coex-tensive and "simultaneou[s]" ith "a radically different rder" ofdemocratic pirituality "in which each person s equally, becauseinfinitely, mportant" 377-78). Inflecting iterary historical mod-els of place and region with a geographical ccent, Howard de-finitively adduces the as-yet-unexplored omplexity with whichlocal color fiction maps lived social relations across changingtemporal (mid-century, postbellum, late-century) and spatial(New England, coastal, inland, metropolitan) xes. At the sametime, she demonstrates he power of more flexible spatial think-ing to reveal he hidden effects of literary historical practices ofcultural mapping and classification.

It is not only such "new" American studies projects thatcan profit from engagement with geography. An exemplary aseof the power of spatial theory to animate historical scholarshipis Lawrence Buell's recent study, The Environmental magination:Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture(1995). Drawing on a wide range of sources in geography andecocriticism, Buell explores the consequences of ecocentric

thinking for traditional Americanist literary scholarship-which, he tartly notes, "presents he spectacle of having identi-fied representation f the natural environment s a major themewhile marginalizng he literature evoted most specifically o it"(9). In response Buell constructs an "environmental anon" thatshifts centers of gravity and meaning: he makes William Bar-tram's botanical conquest of Florida as central to the Revolu-tionary moment as patriot resistance; makes the nonfiction ofCelia Thaxter, Mary Austin, and John Burroughs s instrumen-

tal to the formation of literary ealism as the work of W. D. How-ells and Mark Twain; puts Thoreau-a Thoreau who is nolonger the canonical mythologizer of "androcentric pastorallandscape" 25)-in intimate conversation with women natureand frontier writers. Admittedly, Buell's recourse o place think-ing reads n certain ocal moments as an attempt o trump multi-culturalist or feminist readers at their own game-as when heprivileges nature as "an oppressed and silent class," "doubly oth-




erized" as material act and as figure of the "subservience f dis-empowered groups" (20-21). But Buell nonetheless effectivelydocuments how crucial a lyric and epic imagination f place hasbeen to the formation of the US as a geopolitical entity. Withoutfor a moment abandoning a commitment o the affective powerof literature s such, Buell's work acknowledges "the territorialfacticity of America" (6); by foregrounding he imaginary ofspace and place in the work of literary history, he more fullyexplores he way texts of many kinds-fictive and private, anon-

ical and less so-participate in the making of "democratic ocialspace" Philip Fisher, qtd. 269).I myself have space enough here only to gesture oward he

inroads cultural geography might make on other thorny areas ofliterary historical and critical concentration: he cultural mean-ings of consumerism nd consumption;'3 epresentations f do-mesticity and the troubled conceit of the separate pheres;'4 heproblem of identity politics.'5 At this point, I need to address aconundrum f the new discourses of spatiality uggested by bothBuell's and Howard's ojects. While geographers nd other socialscientists have looked with great eagerness o imaginative extsas resources or articulating uestions about spatiality and socialpower, iterary scholars engaged with geography are often pal-pably defensive about such moves. Let me return briefly o Map-ping America or an illustration. n their introduction o DonScheese's eading of Thoreau's ournal s a "document of land-scape," Franklin and Steiner commend its author for "recov-er[ing] rom the hermetic world of literary criticism he messierentanglements f texts in the 'real' world" 13). The rhetoric s

certainly amiliar, ut it resounds oddly n the context of thinkingabout space and place. The reflex demarcation of the space ofcritical reading from the space of the "'real"' in the nervousforceps of quotation marks) s obviously problematic, nd it syn-ecdochically evacuates he category of literature of any "real"informing content. Surely iterature tself, as an array of prac-tices, has its own spatial history and spatial effects. Borrowingthe habits of mind of the new geography, we might ask a numberof questions. n what spaces, conducing o what "interior eogra-

phies" as Yi-Fu Tuan has called them) does reading happen seeTuan)? How do literary raditions-of genre, canonization, dis-semination-give shape to human nteractions with an environ-ment or landscape? ndeed, how do the writings of the worldtraveler n Concord himself make room or place for an imagina-tive expansion of horizons, a rereading f the text of America?

For articulate nterest n these kinds of questions, we mightturn to an anthology edited by Patricia Yaeger ntitled The Geog-




raphy of Identity 1996)-or rather o its ambitious and cannyintroduction, which supplements ather han merely ntroducesthe essays collected here. Authored argely by social scientists,those essays are mainly concerned with reimagining uch catego-ries of social analysis as the nation-state, he homeland, sover-eignty, nativism, and the contact zone. In her introductory ur-vey, Yaeger argues hat such reimagination demands more thana new sociology"; t demands a "personal or phenomenologicalapproach," a new self-consciousness bout the relation of place

and narration" 5). To the extent that the volume's ssays explorethe simultaneity of such postnational, postmodern spaces aslived material sites and as mediating cultural representations,they exemplify Yaeger's otion of "a new poetics of geography"(18)-a narratology that attends closely to the "irreduciblestrangeness" f space as well as to its political dimensions 6, 18).

This poetics, Geography f Identity uggests, must of neces-sity be elegiac, testifying to contemporary onditions of loss,deportation, forgetting, exile, and displacement, estifying toidentities ever more "disembedded" s the fragile "weave" f ex-istence s increasingly ashioned on the warp and woof of "inco-herence, uncertainty, nstability, nd discontinuity" 154-55; seealso 131). With reference to Jean Baudrillard, Foucault, andabove all Lefebvre, he volume explicitly "emplots he epistemol-ogy of ordinary space"-at least for the soul of man underpostnational capitalism-"as tragedy" (8). Far from generic,however, hat tragedy has specific dimensions. Like other cartog-raphers of the social after Marx, Yaeger maps the spaces we in-habit, adapt, and reproduce not only as "the hiding places of

power" 30), but above all as the hiding places of labor power,that uniquely human capacity or material and spiritual ransfor-mation. Here, on the site of labor, she argues, s where iteraturematters o geography: f it is indeed possible to imagine, as Le-febvre somewhat wistfully does, future utopian spaces in which"the work may shine through the product," literature will be thegrounds of such imagining qtd. in Yeager 27). Its texts, Yaegerasserts, "are especially canny n providing portrait of this nega-tive shining"; hey offer "a place where productivity-in its most

radiant, as well as its most tragic and imbecilic forms-visiblyirradiates he things it has made" 27).Yaeger's escription f the spatial ogic of literature's ower

bears scrutinizing rom the viewpoint of concerns about dis-tinctly US or American canons and texts. Is not the "constant,uncanny rendering f laborious pace" hat marks he fictive orYaeger as a zone of experience and performance tself at least inpart a product of the experience nd representation f particular




spaces-national, regional, geocultural? To what extent, wemight ask, is the unheimlich r "ghostly" he assumes (conven-tionally) to be an effect of the literary not merely generic butbound up with particular patial histories? Yaeger nadvertentlyattests to this possibility n the brief but pointed examples sheprovides: rom Thoreau's Walden 1854), where every railroad iebinding he nation is a "sleeper," figure and memorial or theunmourned, unmoored bodies of Irish workers expended inmaking America; and from Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure

Woman 1899), with its tale of a slave who metamorphoses ntoa tree to avoid being sold off the plantation and is cut down forlumber o build a kitchen or the master's wife. These citations-which roughly sketch an American canon across regions, colorlines, and generic boundaries-remind us that abor's hiddennessitself needs to be spatialized, elocated n even as it "irradiates"distinctly New World histories of nation building Yaeger 27).

Beyond calling attention to the two-way border raffic be-tween American exts and the zone of the literary, also want toremark he relative

modestyof

Yaeger'slaims for literature s a

distinct site of encounter and as a resource or a geocultural po-etics. Mapping American Culture eeks to instill a certain anxietyof environmental praxis; The Geography of Identity exhibits acorrelative nxiety of theory. In a moment when human agentsas diverse as the bystander nd the corporate xecutive, he refu-gee and the neighbor "feel the need to invent a new geographicimaginary," s Yaeger claims, the stakes for cultural heorizingare bracingly high: "Accounting or no less than everything be-comes the global task of the new poetics of geography" 38). Butsuch globalism-the urge to master newly opened territory?-has its own costs, not least of which may be a failure of opennessto local experience, an incommensurability ith the mattering-maps of ordinary workers, wanderers, itizens. Fictive exts, withall their tricks of resistance o the imperatives f the temporaland the teleological, are a far richer resource han literary geog-raphers have thus far recognized for charting the "strangeeffects" of space-its simultaneity, ts encryptations, ts dyna-mism and repressions. As Appadurai, perhaps he most widely

influential heorist of postcolonial paces and identities, notes inYaeger's olume, "it is the imagination hat will have to carry usbeyond" he imagined communities of the past, in a rethinkingof the production of locality and transnationality s lived struc-tures of feeling (40-41). Indeed, the larger nterests of the newgeography-in the facts of contemporaneity, n social justice, nidentity formation, n the transformative ffects of human la-




bor-are "surely too important to be left ... to geographers"(Harvey, Urban 5).

No wonder, hen, that the new geography's eading socialscientists eagerly engage literary exts, canons, and genres: heform of the novel and the effects of Brechtian heater (Harvey,Justice 28-38); the lineaments of the noir sensibility Davis 15-98); postmodernist iction (Zukin); anguage poetry, he autobio-graphical urn in critical writing and the fiction of borderlands(Soja, Thirdspace). am not arguing hat literary ritics and his-

torians should reclaim his territory as their own, rather hat thekinds of textual practices and reading strategies hat continue obe the ground (however uneven) of our field make richer, moreproductive ense of these resources with respect o the new geog-raphy's nimating oncerns about culture, power, and agency. na moment when readers of culture are preeminently ommittedto the study of what Lefebvre alls l'espace vecu-the simultane-ously abstract and material ineaments of our social emplace-ment, a locatedness and relationality t once lived and sociallyconstitutive-imaginative exts represent wide horizon of pos-sibility. They testify with particular acuity to the relations be-tween space and place and the conditions under with both aremade; they excavate ntricate trata of alienation, amnesia, andresistance underlying a "jigsaw" f human uses and notions ofspace (Zukin 195). And they frequently chieve he desideratumof cultural geography s a mode of social critique: hey begin toimagine how such practices of location, reterritorialization, ndboundary making can be differently ituated, and thus reinvestedwith social agency.

3. Reading Room: Space Studies and the Place of LiteraryHistory

By way of conclusion, my charting of the geography/literarystudies nexus demands ome demonstration f sustained eadingas a mode of productive intervention in spatial theorizing.Rather han address he kinds of texts that figure prominently n

the recent writings of geographers, owever, want instead toconsider he work of a writer marginal o all of the revelant riti-cal and literary historical anons I have engaged: Philip K. Dick.Precisely because of its multiply marginal status, his fiction isseamlessly suited to the irregular hape of the intersection be-tween the new geography nd Americanist iterary tudies. Ante-dating the "posthuman" yberpunk edge of William Gibson,




Dick has been only half-heartedly colonized by postmodern the-ory, yet his 50-plus volumes of prose-filled with such titles asThe Simulacra (1964), We Can Build You (1972), and The Crackin Space (1966)-teem with schizophrenia and mass halluci-nogens, flawless replicas and replicants, and transgalactic elitesin control of universal media.'6 Lacking the radical self-consciousness of gender mobility and sexual orientation of Ur-sula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Samuel Delany, Dick appearsmost often in the role of sci-fi elder statesman, an "essentially

humanist" thinker who leaves the pieties of individualism intact(Milner 169), yet his fiction intricately probes the workings ofcollective life in all its mutating forms-exurban, off-world, post-colonized-with a profound commitment to the meaningfulnessand transformative agency created through collective social prac-tice. Equally useful for my purposes is Dick's often-remarked un-ruliness as a writer of formally traditional novels;17 he infamouswarps and cracks in his narratives, I argue, have much to do withhis commitment to exploring the intimate details of specific US

politicaland affective cultures. To the extent that Dick's work

locates itself simultaneously in varied (if not competing) discur-sive traditions, it remains undisciplined, off the grid. It thusmarks the space where the interests of postmodernity studies,geographic cultural critique, and American studies converge.

Dick himself defines his practice in terms proleptic of narra-tives of postmodern spatiality, as the representation of "ourworld dislocated .. , transformed into that which it is not ornot yet" so as to produce "a convulsive shock in the reader'smind, the shock of dysrecognition" Shifting 99). The notion ofthe alternate world is hardly novel, is in fact a hallmark of thesci-fi genre, from H. G. Wells to Gene Roddenberry. But Dick'snovels employ it in remarkably canny ways; they create dramati-cally heightened experiences of complicated yet competing-even mutually exclusive-spatialities and the "power-geom-etries" they shape (Massey, "Power-geometry"). He achieves themost irresistible version of the shock effect in a relatively well-known novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962). Its basic prem-ise is devastatingly simple: Germany and Japan have won the

Second World War. In the ensuing division of global spoils, theUS has been partitioned into three zones-a Nazi-ruled EastCoast, where "Jews and Gypsies and Bible Students" alike havebeen virtually eliminated (21); the Pacific States of America, un-der the "harsh . . . but just" rule of the Japanese (8); and theRocky Mountain states, a neutral zone of desert and pasture hav-




ing "no value" to the Axis in its internal battles for industrialsupremacy 27). This neat geocultural division, however, belies amassive spatial-psychic disorder. As the novel begins, AdolphHitler has been confined to a mental institution, Martin Bor-mann rules as Reichskanzler, nd the entire surface of theglobe-indeed, the confines of the known universe-have beentransformed nto a stage for the enactment of Nazi domination.The Mediterranean as been drained or farmland; he popula-tions of Africa have been obliterated hrough atomic strikes or

reterritorialized s slaves; nitial colonization of the moon andMars has begun; and a German plot to level the Japanese HomeIslands by nuclear attack hatches. The dominant ocial structureis psychotic, as the Nazis fetishize a version of what Lefebvrecalls absolute pace: an ideal, unchanging, stensibly ransparentspatiality-that of Land, Volk, Lebensraum Dick 29, 3)-cut offfrom the reality of the social. Indeed, the very survival of thispostwar world is threatened by the Nazi "sense of space andtime. They see through he here, he now, nto the vast black deepbeyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life" (3).18

Even this brief sketch of Dick's donnee suggests he concep-tual repertoire maginative exts can put at the disposal of spatialtheory. We might consider how The Man in the High Castle at-tends to the lineaments of fascism as a spatial practice and to theways its political ideologies produce bodies and subjects withinthe social spaces-regions, outlands, colonies-they occupy. Wemight chart Dick's narrative patialization f this alternate worldvia a "cat's cradle" of characters whose collective narrative ig-ures the universe of human making as a dense web of "unbroken

lines": "the factory on Gough Street, the Trade Missions thatruled, the exploration of the planets, the billion chemical heapsin Africa that were now not even corpses, the aspirations of thethousands .. in the shanty warrens of San Francisco, he madcreatures n Berlin with their calm faces and manic plans-allconnected . . ." (11). Beyond a mere thematics of space, Dick'snarrative ives texture o a new reality crucial o cultural geogra-phers: "a network of relations,' economic and social, "at everyscale from the global to the local" (Massey, "Politics" 0-81).

For my purposes, however, want to focus on the conse-quences or spatial heory of Dick's creation of alternate worlds.The plural s necessary here, for at the center of The Man in theHigh Castle stands another novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,written by the eponymous author Hawthorne Abendsen. It toois an alternate-world ext; its governing premise, hat the Allies




have defeated Germany and Japan. Within the world of The Manin the High Castle this scenario proves so titillating that the Naziapparatus has banned the book; when protagonist Juliana Frinkdiscovers during a road trip to Abendsen's house in Denver thather companion Joe Cinnadella is actually a Nazi agent sent tomurder him, she slits Joe's throat and continues on alone to warnAbendsen of future attacks. A devoted user of the I Ching, sheconfronts Abendsen with her suspicion that the oracle has writ-ten his novel, and her own consultation reveals that Abendsen's

book is indeed "Inner Truth": "Germany and Japan lost thewar" (247). As the novel ends, Juliana climbs back into her carto return to a motel, that space of transient anonymity, presum-ably to bring the truth home-whatever the homeland, in lightof her discovery, may be.

The Man in the High Castle's double inversion of historyinitially seems to relocate us in the realm of the American real;so suggests the novel's penultimate scene, focused on JapaneseTrade Mission official Tagomi after he shoots two Nazi assassins.Sickened by an act that violates his

pacifistbeliefs,

Tagomiwan-

ders San Francisco in a dissociative "mad dream." As it recedes,he encounters a "hideous, misshapen" growth on the skyline thata passerby identifies as the Embarcadero Freeway, dodges cars"like brutal big crushers, all unfamiliar in shape," and enters adingy luncheonette to demand that one of the "low-place" whitecustomers yield him a seat, only to be warned off with a racistepithet (221-22). Tagomi, in other words, has entered the novel'salternate world-post-McCarthy, postindustrial, white suprema-cist-of our America. Seen through the "convulsive shock" ofhis fugal state, that world is the precise obverse of Dick's occu-pied USA; America has indeed won the first atomic war and inso doing has lost its moral compass.

A number of critics pursue this "humanist" reading (Hayles66-67; Warrick 49). But another, inflected by the new geography,might attend more closely to Dick's thinking about specificallyAmerican forms of spatiality. Dick's Rocky Mountain confeder-ation-a "protestant land" of refugees, survivalists, and grimindividualists (27)-presciently imagines the relocation of the

imaginary frontier in the era of NAFTA, labor in exile, andglobal capital just as Juliana's reverse migration toward Abend-sen, the oracle, and Denver inverts the myth of westering to ex-plore its continuing power. If The Man in the High Castle givesremarkably dense experiential texture to theoretical notions ofabstract and lived space, it is also passionately engaged with the"Inner Truth" of postwar American fantasies of territory, sov-




ereignty, and containment. The ostensibly impregnable HighCastle, said to be surrounded by barbed wire and defended bythe latest technology of security, turns out to be nothing moreand nothing less than the quintessential suburban ranch home,complete with "climbing roses," "flagstone path," and "a child'stricycle parked in the long cement driveway" (240).19

Like the imagined spaces of the West and the frontier, thishome-as-castle-descendent of the City on the Hill-figures andliteralizes what Dick takes to be our deepest spatial fantasy: that

of a zone of impregnable American innocence, untainted by therealities of global capital, atomic conquest, and flexible accumu-lation. But his alternate-world America hardly stops at exposingthe contradictions of this fantasy. It minutely calibrates the enor-mous energy, the imaginativeforce, required to sustain such con-sensual myths of the nation. And it suggests, without false opti-mism, that consensuality is also reclaimable, "our space andtime" being "creations of our own psyche" (224). In the novel'sfinal gesture of inversion, Juliana literally walks away into thesunset, suggesting-in the tradition of the Hollywood Western-the possibility of reclaiming that horizon of agency from its longhistory of uses, misuses, and effects. Hardly nostalgic for a van-ished democratic social order, the doubly inverted world of thenovel imagines contemporary spatial regimes as both intenselydisabling and ready-to-hand, hegemonic and in process-inother words, as the grounds for productive human agency,praxis, artifice.

In conclusion, let me dwell in the possibilities my brief read-ing raises for the convergence of geography and literary studies.

I have suggested how geographic habits of thinking about spaceand place as lived cultural forms, as sites of social contestation,and as mediating discourses can strengthen a wide span of proj-ects definitive of American studies now: new work on regional-ism, including Southwestern and frontier studies as well as urbanhistories; ecocriticism and the study of nature writing; work inethnic studies on the fiction of borderlands, on Native Americanwriting, and on other bodies of texts or folklore concerned withthe realities of cultural hybridity and the changing meaning of

lyric, naturalist, and place-centered cultural forms. Whether wefocus on these projects or on others encompassed by Americanstudies, an engagement with the new geography reminds us howand why literary models and affects continue to matter. Howeverreoriented by the critical turn to culture, literary historians arestill in the business of reading imaginative texts as texts; ourmodes of locating them in specific discursive and historical situa-




tions, webs, contexts-in generic and figurative traditions, forexample, as I have done with Dick-acutely sharpens our per-ceptions of the social-spatial conundrums they negotiate. Butour engagement with these conundrums via the new geography'sconcerns also enables closer negotiation of the fault lines under-lying our field. Dick's alternate-world fiction forces us to experi-ence radically altered but entirely plausible versions of the spatialconstructions foundational to collective national life; it mesmer-izingly unveils the geopolitical shape of America as a space of

illusion. As the new geography recognizes, this kind of revelatorydaydreaming can never be entered into with such precision, suchheightened affect, by abstract formulations of abstract spatialit-ies: 'Amazing," as one of Dick's protagonists puts it, "the powerof fiction, even cheap fiction, to evoke" (8). If such claims strikecritical readers inured to the dismantling of literary studies asnaive, they also suggest what we give up when we cede the prov-ince of imaginative production to anxieties of cultural hegemonyor romances of marginality. Paraphrasing Max Weber, we mightsay that the new geography allows for a reenchantment of ourrelations to imaginative production, understanding fictive textsthemselves-of all kinds-as potential heterotopias: "[S]pace[s]of illusion that expos[e] every real space, all the sites inside ofwhich human life is partitioned, as still more illusory" (Foucault,"Of Other Spaces" 25, 27). Meeting the interests of geographyhalfway, American literary historical and literary critical practicemight situate itself more deftly in contexts, situations, and bodiesof knowledge, and it might discover (if not create) stronger liga-tures between its own concerns and those of other users and

makers of culture.

Notes

1. More intentioned and disciplinary accounts of the emergence of the newgeography and of its critical sources are given in Soja, Postmodern 10-42; Mc-Dowell; Harvey, Urban 1-16; and Gillian Rose, "As If the Mirrors Had Bled:Masculine Dwelling, Masculinist Theory and Feminist Masquerade" (Dun-can 56-58).

2. There is by now a rich literature on the difference and relations betweenplace (laden with organicist associations) and space (associated with the ab-stract and the geometric), as well as revisionist versions of this terminology.For useful and accessible introductions to the debate, see Yi-Fu Tuan, "Placeand Culture: Analeptic for Individuality and the World's Indifference" (Frank-lin and Steiner 27-49); John Agnew and James S. Duncan, eds., The Powerof Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations (1989);Derek Gregory and John Urry, eds., Social Relations and Spatial Structures




(1985); Michael Keith and Steve Pile, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity(1993); and Zukin 11-16.

3. In the style of more traditional historical geography, see Stephen Nissen-baum's "New England and Region as Nation" on the New England village(Ayers et al. 38-61); in that of revisionist social theory, see Harvey, Justice 19-45, on the Cambridgeshire auto plant.

4. For important dissenting accounts within the new geography of postmo-dernity, see Massey, "Politics"; and Kathleen M. Kirby, "Re: Mapping Subjec-tivity: Cartographic Vision and the Limits of Politics" (Duncan 49-53).

5. An introductory bibliography of work in urban studies and urban theorythat has been definitive for the new geography would include Lefebvre, La revo-lution urbaine (1970); Manuel Castells, The Informational City: InformationTechnology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Progress (1989),on a paradigm shift from the space of places to that of technological, economic,and social "flows"; Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991),which traces the evolution of a new logic of transnational production andpower requiring the consolidation of wealth in newly global cities where wealthand social management are concentrated; Harvey, Urban-esp. ch. 6, "Money,

Time, Space, and the City"-on the circulation of capital and value throughthe production of postindustrial urban environments. Susan J. Smith gives auseful overview of the history and current shape of urban geography and itsrelations to urban theory and urban studies. The turn to cultural history-particularly that of urban spaces and institutions constituting what David Sco-bey has identified as a new world of commodified pleasure-has been adroitlyexecuted in his book Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New YorkLandscape, 1850-1890 (Temple UP, 1998); Kathy Peiss's Cheap Amusements:Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986); ElaineAbelson's When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters n the VictorianDepartment Store (1990); and William Taylor's In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture

and Commerce in New York (1992). Recent transdisciplinary studies that em-phasize the cityscape or urban institutions as sites of the production of cultureinclude Kevin R. McNamara, Urban Verbs: Art and Discourses of AmericanCities (1996); M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its HistoricalImagery and Architectural Entertainments 1994); Stephen Kern, The Culture ofTime and Space 1880-1918 (1983); and T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life:Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984).

Among feminist theorists whose work has been definitive for the newgeography, prominent contributors include Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler,Elizabeth Gross, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, bell hooks, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, and Iris Marion Young; within the

boundaries of geography itself, the work of Dolores Hayden has been particu-larly influential. Useful bibliographies can be found in Gillian Rose, Feminismand Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge 1993); Shirley Ardener,Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (1981); Duncan 245-70; andMazey and Lee 75-83.

6. Edward Soja's most recent work, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles andOther Real-and-Imagined Places (1996) most obviously exemplifies this trend;see especially "In Thirdspace with bell hooks" (95-105).




7. On the problematic effects and possibilities created by spatial metaphor,see Smith and Katz; on the problems of representing space and spatiality in thetemporally framed medium of narrative, see Massey, "Politics."

8. Kaplan's larger argument to the repressed histories, the encryptations, cre-ated by traditional delineations of American studies turns on a persuasive read-ing of Perry Miller's "discovery" of America as he enters the liminal space ofAfrica (Kaplan 5-11). But Kaplan's own reading, it might be argued, itself oc-cludes what may be an equally important power geometry: Miller's accountof himself as a dislocated Midwesterner looking "East" for cultural as well asdisciplinary legitimation. Again, a deeper reading of the spatial imaginary at

work in the founding of American studies would account not only for the formsof "denial and displacement" at work (13) but for the nested and hierarchicaleffects of these interlocking cultural spaces. Thanks to David Scobey for callingmy attention to this conundrum.

9. Especially pertinent are William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago andthe Great West (1991), which rewrites urban and regional history through sus-tained attention to material geographic history; Richard White's The OrganicMachine (1995), another regional history written through layered accounts ofthe social, ritual, and cultural practices of various communities staking claimsto the Columbia River; White's and Patricia Nelson Limerick's essays in TheFrontier n American Culture: An Exhibition at the

Newberry Library,ed. James

R. Grossman (1994); and Limerick's discussion of the interests of new westernhistory in Trails: Toward a New Western History (1991), which she edited withClyde A. Milner and Charles E. Rankin.

10. Franklin and Steiner explicitly take their cue in this respect from othertheorists and practitioners working with the landscapes and built structures ofpostwar American mass culture: Herbert Gans's The Levittowners 1967), onstrategies of personalizing the tract house; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,and Stephen Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas (1972), on the allure of the"communicative landscape"; and Wilbur Zelinsky, particularly Exploring theBeloved Country: Geographic Forays into American Society and Culture (1994),on practices of locality and memory embedded in such built forms as roadsidesigns and New England barns.

11. It was, of course, Raymond Williams who reminded us more than a de-cade ago that the notion or keyword nature "contains, though often unnoticed,an extraordinary amount of human history" evolving "as other ideas and expe-riences change" (Problems 67). Harvey has more recently explored in detail theubiquitousness of "nature" as a rhetoric, keyword, and politics with respect tovastly varying relations to managerial environmentalism, ecology, deep ecology,ecoactivism, ecofeminism, and other social movements; despite significantdifferences among their aims and theoretical foundations, there is general ac-ceptance of the idea that the "natural" s significantly modified (if not producedin a more strictly Marxist sense) by human action and behavior; see Harvey,Justice 118-50 and 167-175, esp. 140. Both Harvey and Roderick Nash (TheRights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics [1989]) write at length onthe centrality of wilderness or ecologist notions to American cultural identityand political ideology.

12. Harvey meditates at large on the "the 'permanences' that surround usand which we also construct to help solidify and give meaning to our lives,"




particularly in relation to the tendency within cultural theory to make "dialec-tics" radically separate from "all tangible sense of historical-geographical con-ditions" (Justice 8; see also 81-82, 260-62, 352-54).

13. In the critical context most familiar to literary historians, readings of con-sumption-or, more accurately, consumerism-predictably take up one of tworeified positions: consumerism as narcotic, after the Frankfurt School, or con-sumption as arena of pleasure and appropriation, after competing feminist andcultural studies models. Castells has been particularly influential in redirectingsocial scientific focus on urban processes related not to production or capitalaccumulation but to the consumption of goods and services, with emphasis on

reading urban social movements as an expression of struggle over collectiveconsumption. Closer to home, literary historians are beginning to ask what itmight mean to spatialize the culture of consumption, to rethink consumeraffect and fictions with respect to the space and places consumption occupiesand creates. See, e.g., Richard Keller Simon's essay on the late capitalist shop-ping mall-"the most important space created by American society" under latestage capitalism (Franklin and Steiner 248)-as an adaptation of the formalgarden as a space of socialization.

14. Highly suggestive work on sentimentality, women's writing, and domesticfiction as spatial forms has already begun; in addition to Howard's essay, seeNissenbaum's reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a sentimental account of theNew England village as a model for democratic polity (Ayers et al. 38-61).Both projects open questions that call for more sustained attention: to whatextent do literary and cultural genres participate in the creation of geoculturalorders? To what extent do sentimental texts and ideologies of place interpene-trate one another, forming or informed by what nodes of political, economic,and cultural tension?

15. Patricia Yaeger remarks cogently on the new geography as "an escaperoute from binary thinking" (15-16), particularly with respect to cultural stud-ies and its ongoing "romance" with alterity. See also Gupta and Ferguson; Ap-padurai on ethnicity and identity in Modernity at Large (12-16); and hooks on"relocation" versus cultural separatism as strategy (19).

16. For characteristic elision of Dick's work in favor of its postmodern redac-tion by Riddley Scott and others, see The Cinematic City (1997), ed. DavidB. Clarke.

17. As N. B. Hayles puts it, "there simply is no scheme under which all of a

given novel's details will fit without contradiction" (53).

18. The spatiality of the novel closely approximates the abstract space de-scribed by Lefebvre: "Abstract space, which is the tool of domination, asphyxi-ates whatever is conceived within it and then strives to emerge.... This spaceis a lethal one which destroys the historical conditions that gave rise to it ...in order to impose an abstract homogeneity" (Production 370).

19. See Lefebvre on the "detached, suburban house" as "a democratic par-ody" of fascist architecture and its organic fantasy of "social life based on thenotions of blood, race, nation, and an absolute national state" (Production 275).




Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity atLarge: Cultural Dimensions of Global-ization. Minneapolis: U of MinnesotaP, 1996.

Berger, John. The Look of Things.New York: Viking, 1974.

Brodhead,Richard. Cultures

ofLet-

ters: Scenes of Reading and Writing nNineteenth-Century America. Chi-cago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Castells, Manuel. The InformationalCity: Information Technology, Eco-nomic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. New York: Black-well, 1989.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavat-ing the Future in Los Angeles. NewYork: Vintage, 1992.

Dick, Philip K. The Man in the HighCastle. 1962. New York: Ace, 1976.

. The Shifting Realities ofPhilip K Dick. Selected Literary andPhilosophical Writings. Ed. LawrenceSisin. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

Foucault, Michel. "The Eye ofPower." Power/Knowledge: SelectedInterviews and Other Writings 1972-77. Trans. Colin Gordon. New York:Pantheon, 1980. 146-55.

. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. JayMiskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1986):22-27.

Greenberg, Martin, and Joseph Olan-der, eds. Philip K Dick. New York:Taplinger, 1983.

Gregory, Derek, Ron Martin, andGraham Smith, eds. Human Geogra-phy: Society, Space, and Social Sci-ence. Minneapolis: U of MinnesotaP, 1994.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson."Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity,and the Politics of Difference" Cul-tural Anthropology 7 (1992): 6-43.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Post-modernity: An Enquiry into the Ori-gins of Cultural Change. Cambridge:

Blackwell,1989.

. The Urban Experience. Balti-more: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Hayles, N. B. "Metaphysics and Met-afiction in The Man in the HighCastle." Greenberg and Olander53-71.

hooks, bell. Yearning. Race, Gender,and Cultural Politics. Boston: SouthEnd, 1990.

Howard, June. "Unraveling Regions,Unsettling Periods: Sarah Orne Jew-ett and American Literary History"American Literature 68 (1996):365-84.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or,The Cultural Logic

ofLate

Capitalism.Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Kaplan, Amy. "'Left Alone withAmerica': The Absence of Empire inthe Study of American Culture."Kaplan and Pease 3-21.

Kaplan, Amy, and Donald Pease, eds.Cultures of United States Imperialism.Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production ofSpace. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

. The Survival of Capitalism.Reproduction and the Relations ofCapitalism. Trans. Frank Bryant.London: Allison, 1976.




Massey, Doreen. "Politics and Space/Time.' New Left Review 196 (1992):65-84.

. "Power-Geometry and a Pro-gressive Sense of Place." Mapping theFuture: Local Culture, Global Change.Ed. J. Bird et al. New York:Routledge, 1993.

Mazey, Mary Ellen, and David Lee.

Her Space, Her Place: A Geography ofWomen. Washington: Association ofAmerican Geographers, 1984.

McDowell, Linda. "The Transforma-tion of Cultural Geography" HumanGeography: Society, Space, and SocialScience. Gregory, Martin, and Smith

Milner, Andrew. Literature, Culture,and Society. New York: NYU P, 1996.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: NewYork, London, Tokyo. Princeton:Princeton UP, 1991.

Smith, Neil. "Geography, Differenceand the Politics of Scale." Postmoder-nity and the Social Sciences. Ed. J.Coherty, E. Graham, and M. Malek.New York: St. Martin's. 1992.

Smith, Neil, and Cindi Katz."Grounding Metaphor: Towards a

Spatialized Politics." Place and thePolitics of Identity. Ed. Michael Keithand Steve Pile. New York: Routledge,1993. 67-83.

Smith, Susan J. "Urban Geography ina Changing World." Gregory, Martin,and Smith 232-51.

Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geogra-phies: The Reassertion of Space in

Critical Social Theory. London:Verso, 1989.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study ofEnvironmental Perceptions, Attitudes,and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Pren-tice, 1974.

Warrick, Patricia S. "The Encounterof Taoism and Fascism in The Man inthe High Castle." Greenberg and

Olander 27-52.

Williams, Raymond. Problems in Ma-terialism and Culture: Selected Essays.London: NLB, 1980.

. Resources of Hope: Culture,Democracy, Socialism. Ed. Robin Ga-bele. London: Verso, 1989.

Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power:

From Detroit to Disney World. Berke-ley: U of California P, 1991.

cultural geography and the place of literary

Documents