Littérature et géographie par Rachel Bouvet (review)

This pioneering anthology encompasses thirty years of works in French. Excerpts from monographs and chapters in edited volumes are compiled in a way that brings out new correspondences between concerns and methods. Rachel Bouvet’s six-page Introduction, which suggests a distinctive relationship between francophone culture and geography (p. 2), affirms that ‘l’espace a subi les contraintes imposées par le structuralisme, il a longtemps été confiné aux limites du texte, toute comme la description a été longtemps dévalorisée, conçue tout au plus comme une pause’ (p. 3). The volume explores the spatial turn by way of fourteen chapters in four parts: ‘Le Dialogue entre littérature et géographie’, ‘La Géopoétique et la géocritique’, ‘Lire le paysage’, and ‘Cartes, toponymes et métaphores organicistes’. We encounter leading-lights in the environmental humanities, with extracts from Kenneth White on geopoetics (1994), Bertrand Westphal on geocriticism (2007), and Michel Collot on literary geography (1988/2014). Marc Brosseau’s analysis of romans-géographes (1996), which constitutes the anthology’s first chapter, is referenced in Collot’s recent work and Bouvet’s geopoetic investigation (2015), which was inspired by several of the anthologized studies to ‘déplier l’espace romanesque en quatre temps, à partir de cette “vue” particulière des mathématiciens qui distingue le point, la ligne, la surface et le volume’ (p. 97). Throughout the collection, commonalities mingle with particularities: Brosseau addresses ‘le sens des lieux’ (p. 12), and Collot points to the ‘œuvre-lieu’ (p. 42); White’s concept of geopoetics combines science, philosophy, and poetry (p. 52), whereas Westphal’s geocriticism is all about multifocalization, multisensoriality, stratigraphy, and intertextuality (p. 108). Bachelard, Lefebvre, Deleuze, and Guattari are extensively quoted, as are Edward Relph on placelessness, Yi-Fu Tuan on space/place, and Paul Rodaway on sensuous geographies. Bertrand Lévy’s ‘Cartographie, littérature et résonance régionale’, here in French for the first time, highlights the difference between location and sense of place: ‘le lieu implique une histoire, une identité, des relations humaines, une charge symbolique, alors que la localisation implique un simple positionnement sur les axes de coordonnées x, y, z’ (p. 173). Amid a plethora of male theorists, Liliane Louvel’s ‘L’Œil cartographique du texte — subterfuges de l’iconotexte’ (2000) provides a judicious consideration of maps as generative instruments for fiction (p. 192), which is in keeping with Pierre Jourde’s discussion of imaginary geographies (1991), notably the visualization of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre (p. 203) and Tolkien’s Middle Earth (pp. 207–09). In the absence of an index, the volume closes with a ten-page bibliography in six sections: ‘Espace littéraire — géographie littéraire’, ‘Géopoétique’, ‘Géocritique’, ‘Espace’, ‘Paysage’, and ‘Carte’. Despite the preponderance of references in French indicating limited interactions between linguistic contexts, the collected pieces offer plenty of inspiration for exploring diverse kinds of physical and human geographies across varied media.