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1 Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching Jason Finch Note (28 January 2019): this is the author accepted manuscript incorporating changes made in the peer-review process, stored on my personal website / ‘the website/institutional repository of the author's institute and/or funder’ in accordance with the copyright policy of John Benjamins (see https://benjamins.com/content/authors/rightspolicy). Copyright for the text belongs to John Benjamins and the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. The publisher’s page for the book is https://benjamins.com/catalog/fillm.3 and DOI https://doi.org/10.1075/fillm.3. 1 2 Table of Contents Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements List of Images and Maps Chapter 1. Introduction A Distinctive Activity Organization of the Work Preliminaries Place versus Space? Casey and Certeau Contextualism and Meta-Contextualism Fascism and the Problem of Place Working Principles Inside and Outside Texts Interactivity, Interdependence and the Lived Body Scale, Limits, Technologies Topographic not Synoptic Place First Not Two but Three Terminology The Landscape Alternative 3 The Case for Location Imaginative Place Experience Methodology A Triad Zooming Scholarly, Creative and Cartographic Resources Summing Up Chapter 2. Applications in Research and Pedagogy Locating Two Poets Gwendolyn Brooks in “Bronzeville” and Chicago Christina Rossetti in London (95) The Intratextual Landscape of a Single Work of Literature: Bleak House Hillis Miller and Dickens: A Study in Topographic Criticism Mapping Novels in the Head A Line Running Down through England Interim Conclusion Two Pedagogic Forays into the Decayed Inner City A Fulham Novel: Photographs and Cultural Difference 39.289372°N, 76.646848°W: The Imaginative Place Project 4 Conclusion: Better Mental Mapping Chapter 3. The Heideggerian Fourfold and a Shakespeare Play Reclaiming Heidegger for Literary Studies Mysticism, Fascism and Deconstruction Literature, Art and Interaction The Fourfold of Henry IV, Part Two Conclusion: Multiple Temporalities, Multiple Fourfolds Chapter 4. The Precise Spot Occupied by a Renaissance Playhouse Theatre and Thing Afterlives and Repeated Returns The Roaring Girl on London’s Peripheries A Guide for the Provincial Gallant Liberties, Fields, Suburbs and Beyond The Intermediate Fortune Time Travel Conclusion: Context and Space Revisited Chapter 5. Spatial Deixis and a Single Story Levinson’s Neo-Whorfian Linguistics Context and the Thing 5 Frames of Reference in “The Letter” Extra-Textual Reference: Long Island Paths of Reading Chapter 6. Technology and Toponym in a Canonized Novel Electronic Maps and Cosmopolitanism Placing Forster’s Abinger Hammer: Online Maps and Legwork Mapping Chapter 19 of Howards End with Toponyms The Potential of Literary GIS Chapter 7. An Imaginative Place: The East End of London Repeated Returns to the East End Plotting the Shifting East End Stages on One Road: Gissing, Shaw, Morrison Going too Far? Thomas Burke and the Ethics of Slum Fiction The East End after Burke Second Stab Chapter 8. Anti-Place and Multiple Place in Beckett Placed and Unplaced Writing? London Toponyms in Murphy: A Board-Game World The Madhouse of Murphy: Anti-Place Re-Placed 6 Regions of “Nameless Things” Turning the Telescope on the Without: The “Manywheres” of Endgame Conclusion: Toponyms, Regions and Categories of Writer Afterword A-Z Glossary of Terms Introductory Note Entries: anti-modern, archaeology, archipelago, architecture, art, atmosphere, background, barrier, biography, border, boundary, bridge, cartography, centre, chora, chronotope, city, cityscape, clearing, colony, compass points, concrete, container, context, cosmopolitanism, country, critical, deixis, depth, displacement, distant reading, district, door, dwelling, earth, ecology, engagement, environment, equiprimordiality, everyday life, experience, extension, flâneur, forest, fourfold, frame of reference, gender, geocriticism, geographical information systems [GIS], geography, globalization, ground, heterotopia, history, home, horizon, house, humanistic, imaginative place, individual, interaction and interdependence, intra- textual arrangements, iridescence, junction, land, landscape, limit, (literary) criticism, literary studies, literature, lived body, loc-, local, 7 locale, location, loco-reference, manywheres, map, metropolis, mimesis, mobility, modernity, motion, mountains, multiple unity, nation, neighbourhood, non-place, non-representational theory, nostalgia, original, particularity, path, periphery, photography, physical experience, place, place and space, placelessness, plain, plane, point, polycentricism, porosity, position, possible worlds, power, practical concept, pre-understanding, problem of place, psychogeography, questionability, realism, reference, region, repeated returns, representation, river, road, room, rootedness, route, ruin, rural, scale, scene, sea, sense, setting, shore, site, sociology, space, spatialism, spirit, stasis, street, suburb, surroundings, synoptic, technology, thing, topo-, topography, topology, toponym, topos, triad, universe, urban, verisimilitude, visual image, wilderness, world, zooming. List of References Index 8 Series Editor’s Preface 9 Acknowledgements A somewhat different version of Chapter 8 appeared in Literary Geographies 1.1 (2015). I would like to thank Neal Alexander and the anonymous readers of the first version of that article, who between them helped me appreciate the range of earlier locational work on Beckett and introduced me to some important recent work in literary geography. Preliminary versions of three chapters were presented at conferences: Chapter 5 at Language, Culture and Mind 4 (Turku, 2010), Chapter 6 at ESSE-11 (Istanbul, 2012) and Chapter 7 at FINSSE-6 (Joensuu, 2012). I would like to thank participants in those discussions for their feedback, in particular David Cooper, John Stotesbury and someone whose name I don’t know, who told me that the day before my 2010 presentation in Finland she had travelled on the Long Island Rail Road. My esteemed doctoral supervisor and friend Roger Sell encouraged me years ago to write an accessible book about literature and place, and then he commissioned this book. As founding Series Editor for John Benjamins’s FILLM Studies series, he has steered the whole process, providing detailed advice at every stage: I hope it bears some resemblance to the book he meant. The two anonymous readers who read the first draft of the typescript helped me with reports that were extremely incisive and helpful. I would like to thank Lance Browne for sending me printable high- 10 resolution versions of the photographs he took for the 1976 edition of Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room and for giving me permission to reproduce them in this book. A special thank-you is due to my brother Duncan Finch, who was ready to pop out of his London flat one sunny October morning in 2015 and take decent photographs of Fortune Street to replace the wonky ones I took on the same spot two years earlier. Much of the book was written during the academic year 2013–14, during which I was a visiting researcher at the Institute of English Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London) for six months and then for a further six months at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. There were many inspiring discussions during this period, both with people in these institutions and elsewhere in London, for which I would particularly like to thank Wim Van Mierlo, Carmen Donia, Greg Dart, Richard Dennis, Andrew Glazzard, Luke Seaber, Alastair Owens and Steve Taylor. Lieven Ameel of the University of Helsinki and Markku Salmela of the University of Tampere both read early drafts of certain chapters. Our cooperation, together with quite a few others, in the development of the Helsinki Literature and the City Network has been one of the great features of the past few years. Other personal thank-yous are due, as always, to my parents Alison Finch and Graham Finch, as well as, for various sorts of support and 11 encouragement, to my friends Adam Borch, Iain Rainey, Ulf Långbacka and Petra Zilliacus. My dear wife Eva Finch read the whole manuscript and gave comments that were constructive and above all encouraging. Over the past thirteen and a half years she has helped me more than I can express. Jason Finch, Hammarbacka/Vasaramäki, Turku/Åbo, August 2015 12 List of Images and Maps Images 1. Doorbells of a house in multiple occupation, probably in or near Lots Road, London SW10, 1975 (photograph: Lance Browne) 2. Houses in multiple occupation looking towards Lots Road Power Station, Lots Road, London SW10, 1975 (photograph: Lance Browne) 3. Woman walks towards a corner shop, Kennington, London SE10, 1975 (photograph: Lance Browne) 4. Fortune Street, London EC1, looking east, October 2015 (photograph: Duncan Finch) 5. Looking west from Fortune Street, London EC1, towards the Golden Lane Estate, October 2015 (photograph: Duncan Finch) 6. Fortune Street Park, London EC1, October 2015 (photograph: Duncan Finch) 7. Detail of the Two Brewers pub, junction of Fortune Street and Whitecross Street, London EC1, October 2015 (photograph: Duncan Finch) Maps 1. The toponyms of Chapter 19 of Forster’s Howards End 2. The East End moves east: reference points from Oliver Twist to EastEnders. 13 Chapter 1. Introduction A Distinctive Activity This is not a book about “Theory” let alone a theoretical text. Instead,
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