Sheila Hones

Literary geography: setting and narrative space

This paper explores some of the ways in which analytical strategies developed within narrative theory might be combined with recent developments in literary geography in the study of setting and narrative space. It suggests that despite narrative theorys urge toward categorization and its associated tendency to conceive of space as relatively stable and fixed, the technical vocabulary developed within the discipline has much to offer the literary geographer. The first section of the paper reviews some of the areas of potential collaboration in this cross-disciplinary overlap, while the second section offers three brief case study readings designed to suggest the potential of a combination of the analytical specificity of narrative studies with the imaginative stretch of spatial theory. The case studies look at setting and narrative space as they emerge in relation to narrative voices and multiple audiences in three case study texts: P.K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle (1962), J.A. Mitchells The Last American (1889), and F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby (1925).

Geographies of American Studies

A paradoxically conservative aspect of recent moves to “internationalize” the practice of American studies has been the way in which this turn toward the international has taken the national for granted. At the very moment that Americanists have been striving to disentangle disciplinary subject matter from the constraints of a static and border-oriented view of world space, calls to internationalize disciplinary practice have been reifying national boundaries and sorting scholarly activity by physical locations and national academies. In this article, we engage with this paradox by focusing on the ways in which dominant geographies of American studies practice are produced and sustained discursively. Our argument is that much U.S.-based writing about “international” or “global” American studies not only essentializes existing borders and subject positions, but also works to naturalize the idea that the U.S.-based Americanist position is simultaneously domestic and universal, while American studies as practiced elsewhere is by contrast foreign and located. Our aim is to destabilize the dominant geography that naturalizes the existing organizational forms and spatialized hierarchies of the field worldwide and limits the ways in which its futures can be imagined and debated. On the basis of our premise that different conceptualizations of global geography recognize and validate different kinds of scholarly interaction, we argue that a more self-conscious and theoretically informed geography of American studies practice would not only make it possible to acknowledge a greater variety of currently existing but practically invisible flows of work, ideas, and knowledge, but would also open up new opportunities for future collaborations of currently unimagined kinds across different kinds of distance. Our argument is made in the tradition of the critical geography of academic knowledge production and directed toward embedded space-producing practices current within the interdisciplinary work of American studies. As geographer Lawrence Berg has argued, “given the radically changing geographies of ‘America’. . . there is no better time than the present moment to interrogate the relationships between the production of ‘American’ space and the spatialized cultural politics of knowledge production in American Stud-

Literary geography and the short story: setting and narrative style

This article deals with setting and narrative style in the literary geography of short fiction. In its first section it reviews four commentaries on geographies of the short story. In its second section it makes a close reading of Alice Walker’s one-page story ‘Petunias’ in which it argues that for the story to happen readers must contribute to the event not only a high level of participatory engagement but also a willingness to exercise a particular kind of spatial knowledge.

Muji, Materiality, and Mundane Geographies

This paper is based on the premise that mundanity is not so much a quality inherent in an object or event as an appearance or affordance generated at the intersection of object, subject, and location. Assuming that a single object will appear banal in one context and different in another, we focus our attention on cases in which a single object is encountered as both banal and different—visible and invisible at the same time, marked out by its ability to blend in. In this paper we explore the mundane and distinctive by reference to marketing and products of the Japan-based company Muji, and in particular through relating the two contrasting aspects of the Muji image to the different ways in which the objects are located in presentation-marketing contexts and in wear-use contexts. In order to explore the usefulness of this distinction between display space and use space we perform a tactical erasure of the commonsense distinction between the textual and the material, thereby enabling the collapsing together, into the single category of display space, of the textual spaces of Muji catalogues and the material spaces of Muji shop floors. The distinction between the en-masse presentation of new objects in highly controlled display spaces and the mundane wear and use of purchased objects in the various and variously encountered spaces of everyday life is explored through the hybrid display-use space of Muji show homes known as Muji-Infill. We conclude by proposing that this display-use distinction can be used strategically to articulate the way in which skilled consumers are able to encounter objects imaginatively and practically in two different contexts simultaneously. In other words, we speculate that, when skilled consumers encounter a superficially mundane Muji object in the literal and disorganised context of use space, they are able to recognise it as stylish and desirable in part by referring to an acquired understanding of the ways in which that object-in-use evokes a Muji marketing space of massed objects-on-display.