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  • Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu
  • Vance Byrd
Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet.
By Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2016. 312 pages + 41 b/w illustrations. $99.95 hardcover, $39.95 paperback, $19.95 e-book.

Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu's book lays out analytical language to explain the interplay of narrative and space. Foregrounding theory and methods, the authors are upfront about the fact that their study does not offer close readings of any single text. Instead, they bring together narrative theory and geography to produce a useful roadmap for conducting research on narrative space and spatialized narratives across a wide range of subjects, locations, and media: literature, illustration, film and television, computer and video games, city streets and commemorative landscapes, and museums.

The first half of the book focuses on the spatial turn in narrative theory while the rest addresses narrative theories of objects found in real-world spaces and places. The first chapters provide concise working definitions of space and place without getting bogged down in scholarly debates on these terms. As one works through the book, each chapter adds on typologies, such as tour, map, container, emotional and strategic space, as well as hybrid conceptions of how narrative can be spatialized.

This idea of strategic space is developed productively throughout the book. The authors observe that most approaches to space refer to a metaphorical sense of space rather than investigate strategic, purpose-driven uses of space and how characters and objects are situated and move in a fictional setting in a story (17). In Chapter Three, for instance, the authors use maps and verbal texts to show how approaches that draw upon cartography and narrative theory can be more productive than space-only or verbal-only approaches. Maps cannot easily convey what it is like to live in an unfamiliar location, while a verbal description of the location cannot convey "a network of relations between objects" one might encounter there (45). To prove their point about strategic space, they evaluate a number of cases in which reading the space in maps and literature intersect. When working with literature, a writer can introduce a "map of spatial form," which requires reflection about the story in order to visualize [End Page 120] narrative space. The creation of a reader's map while working through a story aids the interpretation of plot and characterization. And if we take more distance from the immediate verbal narrative, we can attempt to figure out how actual locations from the plots of literary works are set in real-life geographies by consulting printed maps or navigating the spaces themselves. Both activities of research and mapmaking uncover strategic and symbolic meaning, which would be otherwise difficult to discern in literary texts alone. While this procedure might be productive in some cases, the authors observe that maps can be useless for readers. The map in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels does not help us retrace the plot due to its scale and discrepancies. In this instance, they continue, the map ultimately fails because correspondences between the map and the story are largely irrelevant and are unimportant for descriptions of the culture and the novel's plot (52). By contrast, Robert Louis Stevenson's map for Treasure Island gives us a productive way to think about the creative process (54). As such, the authors model how to critically work with maps and the literature they accompany.

Their deliberation of maps continues in Chapter Five, in which the authors turn to spatiality in multiplayer online games and in digital maps. While digital documents may not have obvious spatial character except for the physical computers and devices in which their data are stored (101), the authors explore how spatial metaphors help us imagine how information is organized and how we gain access to it through hypertexts, in "windows," and "cyberspace." As in the other parts of the book, the authors provide terms to think about the complexity of narration and space required for...

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