Going beyond the grid: literary mapping as creative reading

ABSTRACT

Drawing from the importance of narrative inquiry in contemporary geographical reasoning and teaching, this paper focuses on some practices set around the relationship between maps and literature. Reader-generated maps, maps produced starting from the reading of a literary text, are at the core of a reflection on the potentialities of literary mapping in higher education; relating maps and literature in an educational environment, I suggest creative reading and creative mapping as co-constructive practices that are able to guide students in addressing and internalising the complexity of spatial categories. Reflecting on the students’ literary mappings, I focus on the various ways that the literary map contributes to mobilising the space of the text, guiding students in approaching spatial issues from a different (and creative) perspective. Time, point of view and literary trans-scalarity are the key narrative concepts that guide and inform possible inductive ruminations on literary mapping as a learning strategy. Following the core question of “what literary mapping might be and do in the digital age”, I aim to resituate contemporary discussions on literary mapping in an educational environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary mapping
• narrative inquiry
• creative reading
• experiential learning
• literary geography

Acknowledgments

The author’s full gratitude goes to Professor Mauro Varotto for encouraging and supporting the literary mapping workshop, and the writing of this paper. The author wants also to thank Professor Tania Rossetto for her time, and her invaluable suggestions, and all the students who participated to the workshop: without their enthusiasm and true commitment all the reflections contained in this paper could not exist.

Notes

1. From this point on, I use the phrase “literary mapping” instead of “literary cartography”. This statement follows recent map theories that focus on maps as “always mapping” (Kitchin & Dodge, 2007, p. 7) and conceive of cartography as a processual rather than a representational science. The literary mapping process lies at the core of my educational reflections in this paper.

2. To name but a few projects led by scholars: Mapping the Lakes: A literary GIS (see Cooper & Gregory, 2010), Mapping St. Petersburg (see Young & Levin, 2013), Mapping Emotions in Victorian London (see Heuser et al., 2016) and the above mentioned A Literary Atlas of Europe.

3. Creative reading only partially precedes creative mapping; indeed, the material mapping takes place concurrently with multiple (mapping-aimed) rereadings.

4. The course was taught by Professor Mauro Varotto. As a PhD student in geography with a master’s degree in literary theory and criticism, I collaborated in the course by conducting the workshop.

5. The workshop was held by a representative of Nokia Here. The company sponsored a project called Here Maps – Expert Community at the University, promoting free workshops to teach students how to contribute to its cartographic databases (in exchange, the company obtained some new cartographic data produced by students).

6. Each cluster of groups working on the same short story was labelled with a letter; this helped me organise the work during the workshop and to refer to these groups as such during the analysis of the results presented in this article.

7. Among these literary accounts, only Levi’s collection was translated into English in 1984, published by Shocken Books, New York.

8. These had the extensions Google My Maps and uMap.

9. Their nature guides students to reflect on their construction, apart from their final appearance.

10. For some reflections on the possibility to map different kinds of literary spatialities see Piatti, Reuschel & Hurni (2013).

11. The interpretation is built on the students’ literary mapping papers submitted together with the literary maps.

12. The story belongs to the collection Sentieri sotto la neve (Paths beneath the snow, 1998).

13. The short story belongs to the collection Il sistema periodico (The periodic table, 1975), in which each story is an autobiographical episode connected to one element of the periodic table.

14. This is a character who speaks from inside the narration, participating in the narrated events.

15. The story belongs to the collection Sessanta racconti (Sixty short stories), edited and published in 1958.