Edna O'Brien and narrative diaspora space

Given the persistent presence of migration in the work of Edna O'Brien, it is surprising how marginal a theme it is in critiques of her work. This article explores how questions of diaspora have reached a renewed level of depth and intensity in her novel The Light of Evening (2006) and the related short story ‘My Two Mothers’ (2011). Looking, in particular, at how letters play a central role in the relationships of three generations of Irish women across three countries, it analyses how issues of mother(land), diaspora and belonging are mediated through migrant fiction. It draws on the work of Avtar Brah and Paul Ricoeur to argue that, along with related forms of textuality within O'Brien's oeuvre, letters represent a ‘narrative diaspora space’ which illuminates the relationship between mothers, daughters and writing in Irish migrant experience.     

Towards new (graphic) narratives of Europe

The cultural policy of the European Union (EU) has become more important than before as economic crisis threatens to undermine the EU’s nascent political identity. This paper offers graphic narrative (or comics) as a medium particularly suited to the task. This suitability results from several features: (1) the text/image hybridity of comics, which eases translation into multiple languages; (2) the topological aspect of graphic narrative, in which panels compose a spatial network of relations of various intensities that is isomorphic with the theorization of European space offered by a key EU think tank; and (3) the potential for comics of the ‘everyday’ to narrate a plural, non-didactic identity with which both Europeans and others can identify. It is hoped that a policy such as this could have a more positive influence on the more territorial, exclusive notions of the EU.     

The real-and-imagined spaces of philhellenic travel

This article focuses on philhellenic travellers' perceptions and experiences of Greece in the early nineteenth century, especially during the War of Independence in the 1820s. The central argument is that philhellenes – that is to say, supporters of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire – understand Greece as a ‘real-and-imagined’ space. Greece is an ‘imagined’ location in the sense that philhellenic conception of it is shaped by certain rhetorical assumptions and priorities. But, evidently, it is also a ‘real’ space, not simply in the obvious sense that the landscape has a tangible existence, but also in that those rhetorical constructions have concrete consequences and expressions. These expressions are especially significant because philhellenic travellers conceive the region as both a literal and conceptual borderland on the edges of Europe. They consider Greece fundamental to European history, culture and self-definition, but because it is ruled by the Ottoman Empire, it is also an unfamiliar space at the margins of Europe. In other words, Greece is both within and outside European space, and its liminal position represents wider uncertainties about the conception of Europe in the early nineteenth century.     

Museums and the ‘Death of Experience’: singularity,interiority and the outside

This paper discusses a number of well-known critiques of the museum that seek to identify it as a problematic space for experience. The key argument put forward is that we can find within that analysis a critical geography around the museum that help us to understand the work that it does in relation to experience. Three spatial motifs are drawn from this analysis and discussed: the singular, the interior and the outside. The paper argues that museums since the nineteenth century have established a topos for experience based on a mimetic realism around the experience of both culture and history through the first two of these spatial expressions. Through them museums produces a fabulation of culture and history that supplements for the lack of topos for experience found within modern society as a whole. The latter spatiality – that of the outside – is found in the form of the absent–presence of the event in relation to the archiving principle of the museum, thereby continually unsettling the first two expressions and calling them into question. This dynamic reveals the museum as a space to critically think about what it does with experience and the importance of spatial analysis for that.     

Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture,Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction

The novel in nineteenth-century Bengal was formed under European influence, adopting its techniques of representation from bourgeois realist fiction. Both witness to and participant in the making of colonial modernity, it placed particular emphasis upon the social substantiation of persons through the depiction of domestic interiors. The furniture of the bourgeois house became an important ingredient in that representational process. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's examination of the way in which furnished interiors came to compose the universe of private man in the nineteenth century, I argue that in the Bengali novel, there is a constant tension between that mode of self-construction and the suspicion and distrust of European furnishings exhibited in representative novelists of the period. Ultimately, in the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore, this distrust manifests itself in a rejection of the bourgeois interior, as well as a questioning of the very tools of realist representation.     

Afterimages of the Victorian City

As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectroscope by the artist Paul St George. It traces two distinct genealogies of renderings of Victorian urban spaces in current popular culture. While filmic renderings are obsessed with the ghostly circulation of Victorian spectres haunting the present, steampunk artists imagine an alternative temporality, locating the origin of an alternative future in the mobility of Victorian metropolitan culture.     

制度厚实、制度空间与区域发展

1990年代以来,经济地理学愈来愈多地开始倾向于用制度和社会文化因素来解释区域经济发展。本文回顾了西方制度取向经济地理学的理论背景及其主要研究内容,并在探讨制度厚实和制度空间的理念及其与区域发展关系的基础上,探讨了西方制度经济地理学的研究发现及其不足。本文认为,对于制度转型时期的大国-中国而言,倘能将包涵尺度特征与制度套叠变化的制度空间理念纳入到大规模制度变迁与中国区域经济发展的理论框架中,将有助于深化对中国区域空间差异的解释能力。     

淮海经济区城市空间影响范围与城市经济区划分

运用因子分析法求取淮海经济区20个地级市的综合实力指数及等级划分。根据城市综合实力指数和等级划分,选取4个一级城市作为中心城市,然后运用断裂点公式计算中心城市与邻近城市的空间影响距离。再根据空间影响距离划分各中心城市经济影响区范围。最后以城市经济影响区为基础,综合考虑各城市的区域特征、发展潜力、现有经济规划、历史习惯和人文特征,确定城市经济区界限。研究淮海经济区城市经济区形成和划分的目的是指明各城市在整个区域内劳动地域分工中的地位,了解城市经济发展现状和主要特点。     

基于行为空间视角的大观园空间解读

对微观个体行为空间研究已经成为人文地理学空间研究的重要内容。本文以曹雪芹《红楼梦》中核心人物的活动信息和空间信息为资料依据,在国内首次从地理学微观个体行为的视角,在理论和方法论上对小说核心人物行为空间进行思考和研究,尝试将行为地理学研究方法引入文学文本研究领域。研究认为:从地理学视角对小说核心人物的空间信息、活动信息进行统计,以此作为人物微观个体行为空间信息要素是可行的;从地理学行为空间视角思考作者对小说文本内容设计意图,有利于对小说文本进行理性的解读与思考,避免文本被意识形态化。     

人文地理学研究中对空间的再认识

作为人文地理学的核心概念,空间在全球化、信息化、人文主义、后现代主义、地理学社会与文化转向等语境下需要重新认识。首先对空间认知转变的背景进行阐释,在此基础上重点辨析国内外研究成果中对于"空间"的核心论述,把对空间的认知转变归结为4点:(1)从科学的空间到人性的空间;(2)从物质的空间到非物质的空间;(3)单纯的空间到复杂的空间;(4)从"外壳"的空间到空间里面的空间。最后提出对我国当前人文地理学研究的3点启示:(1)注重学科基础概念的重新认识;(2)重视微观层面的细化研究;(3)加强跨学科的整合研究。