Sappho in Lyric IV: Michael Field’s Spatial Poetics of Desire and Defeat

In this article, I offer a close reading of Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889), specifically of lyric IV, with the primary aim of showing how Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper appropriate the archaic figure of Sappho, dramatise her Ovidian romantic tragedy and, in so doing, reconceptualise the notional category of spacein two complementary ways: on the one hand, lyric space becomes a tense locus of contention between form-as-hope and content-as-despair and, on the other, the correlation established between space, nature and gender results in a transgressive topography in which, as I conclude, a new Sappho emerges both as a tragic heroine and as an extremely possessive consciousness laden with sheer Hegelian desire.

The Interconnections between the Czech Methodological Platform and the Ideas of Modern Ukrainian Literature Studies

The article under studies identifies the methodological ties between modern Czech and Ukrainian literary studies on the example of Ivo Pospišil’s monograph “Methodology and Theory of Literary Slavic Studies and Central Europe” (2015). The methodological platform of the scientist is shown in dynamics: comparative studies, phenomenology, historical poetics, genre studies and areal studies. Areal (spatial) philology becomes the methodological framework and “cognitive tool” in the above work. Within the specific features of the hermeneutic circle, I. Pospišil outlines the methodological principles of Brno areal studies, as well as substantiates the powers of areal methodology. Hence, by means of deduction, he narrows the areas of its application and eventually connects spatial poetics to the analysis of specific texts of modern Czech literature. In this respect, areal studies are consonant with the methodology of the N. Kopystyanska’s scientific school. From the standpoint of literary axiology, I. Pospišil characterizes the literary process of 1960–1970 in the way that coincides with the ideas of D. Zatonsky and T. Hundorova. The interpretation of the tropical nature of allegory and symbol, within the areal issues, resonates with a number of Ukrainian investigations. I. Pospišil’s speculations on the problem of auto-reflection and auto-axiology of creativity is based mainly on the concepts of O. Potebnja, on whose methodological reputation rely the works of most Ukrainian researchers. The phenomenon of Central Europe is regarded in the context of “Central European centrism” and multiculturalism, which conceptually brings the scientific research closer to the American studies by N. Vysotska and T. Denysova. I. Pospišil emphasizes the influence of Central European university traditions of the first half of the XX century on the formation of the Prague Linguistic Circle, as well as on the scientific growth of F. Wallman, S. Vilinsky, R Jacobson and R. Wellek. The concept of the history of Russian literature, proposed by I. Pospišil, leads to the profound analysis of the scientific figure of D. Chyzhevsky, which is being widely studied in Ukraine. It is concluded that the “methodological balance” of Czech and Ukrainian literary criticism is ensured by common “pendulum movements” in the history of the literary process, common theoretical and literary basis (works by O. Potebnja, M. Bakhtin, D. Chyzhevsky, D. Ďurišin), parallel influences of Western European literary criticism, as well as collective conference events and consensual research optics.

A Walk with Life and Death: Spatial Poetics in Viramontes’s ‘Neighbors,’ McCarthy’s The Road, and Alarcón’s ‘The Visitor’”

This article draws on M. de Certeau, J. Jacobs, and H. D. Thoreau, among others, to explore the cultural representation of walking as a revitalizing urban force, a daily practice that although seemingly ordinary and apolitical, may become potentially subversive of the deadening impulses of cartography and capitalism. The analysis focuses on the complex links between walking, creativity, and death. The article discusses three American stories that, in their heterogeneity and the diversity of their origins and proposals, provide for new approaches to either subversive or submissive practices of walking and performing space, from Chicana author Helena María Viramontes’s “Neighbors” (1985), where characters appear increasingly paralyzed, entering a state of stasis, subjected to the obstacles of ordered, dominated spaces; to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), where a father and son struggle to remain alive by walking, paradoxically, on the road; to finally Daniel Alarcón’s “The Visitor” (2005), where a father and his surviving children strive to come back from a post- apocalyptic space by walking over the ruins of their small village, by creating paths anew. Despite their differences, these stories share the image of literally or figuratively walking on a lifeless, threatening universe: from the deadening streets in Viramontes’s “Neighbors,” to the symbolical death-in-life of the characters in McCarthy’s The Road, and to the resurgent life above the cemetery, in Alarcón’s “The Visitor.”

The Topographical Imagination: Space and organization theory

We live in a time of space, also in the study of organization. This review essay reflects on the state and the potential of organization theory’s spatial turn by embedding it in a wider movement of thought in the humanities and social sciences. Reading exemplary studies of organizational spatialities alongside the broader history and renaissance of spatial thinking allows us to identify and discuss four twists to the spatial turn in organization theory. First, organization is understood as something placed or sited. Second, it is a site of spatial contestation, which is constitutive for (and not merely reflective of) organizational life. Third, such contestation is itself an outcome of a spatial multiplicity that encompasses affects, technologies, voids and absences. Fourth, such an excess of space is beyond (or rather before) representation and thus summons a spatial poetics. In following these twists, increasingly complex and speculative topographies of organization take shape.

The Aesthetics of Island Space

The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts (from The Tempest to The Hungry Tide), journals of explorers and scientists (such as Cook and Darwin), and Hollywood cinema (e.g. The Hurricane and King Kong), tracing how islands have offered vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the poetic energies of words and images and the material energies of the physical world. Its chapters focus on America’s island gateways (e.g. Roanoke and Ellis Island), tropical islands (e.g. Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the Pacific Northwest, and mutable islands (e.g. the volcanic and coral islands in Wells’s fiction). The book argues that the modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual challenges to spatial experience, and that these challenges were negotiated via the poetic engagement with islands. Postcolonial theorists maintain that islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story: the experience of islands in the age of discovery also went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of global space. Rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space suggests that the modern encounters with islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a diversification of spatial experience, and explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by non-fictional and fictional responses.

Aldo Rossi: the ‘autobiography’ and its fragments

The year 1966 demarcated a borderline in the urban design discipline. Three books published that indicated a change of direction: City architecture by Aldo Rossi, The territory of architecture by Vittorio Gregotti and Complexity and contradiction in architecture by Robert Venturi. Aldo Rossi, in contact with Ernesto Nathan Rogers and “Casabella-Continuità”, shifted the attention to the historic, consolidated city, the monument and urban rules of archaeological fabric, while Vittorio Gregotti developed a research trend that founded architecture on geography. Finally, Robert Venturi opened up the architectural project, revealing its relations with media culture and with the contradictions of the consumer society. Critical essays investigated the phase following the second half of the Sixties, at the time when Aldo Rossi began, in 1976, to travel across America, invited by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies to show his works at a series of exhibitions. His book A Scientific Autobiography, written and developed in America, belonged to this phase, which characterised at an international level by the birth of Paper Architecture (the movement that had placed design at the centre of reflection as the expression of new spatial poetics). The essay aimed to show a change in the paradigm of Rossi’s thought, no longer and solely focusing on past and physical architecture, but unrelentingly entwined with the individual and personal destiny of the Milanese architect. Memory became an active, live field of investigation, as Rafael Moneo maintains on Rossi’s thought, in which an objective vision of architecture no longer counted but one that included the subject and his fragments.