Marc Brosseau: The Context Of Geography's Literature

Marc Brosseau, a cultural geographer, proposes a critical and comprehensive contour of what he calls “Geography’s Literature” through which literature intersects with “the broader intellectual agenda” of geography (Brosseau 1994: 335). In this article, Brosseau not only documents the intersection between geography and literature since the 1970s but also argues that literature can be a new object for geography. He scathingly criticises the geographers who are looking for real facts and simple descriptive catalogues in novels. Such geographers, Brosseau points out, limit their main concern to “determining whether or not novelists were good geographers, in other words, whether or not they ’stick’ to the kind of facts one expects to find in a geography …show more content…
Thus, this contour approximates “how the text defines its reader, how it creates an ’eye’, and how it questions geography’s rational discursivity” (Brosseau 1994: 347). Hence, Brosseau coins his concept of “novel-geographers” to foreground the spatial contour of literary geography through mapping out people’s spatial experience within the novelistic discourse with its “epistemological insight” (Brosseau 2009: 214). In short, Brosseau’s literary geographic contour of novelistic space show the novel’s construction of a geographical map that identifies “people and place, society and space” (Brosseau 1994: 348). Furthermore, Brosseau, as a cultural geographer, adds another dimension to the spatial contour of geography’s literature. The new dimension of this contour draws the attention to the cultural turn in geography and enables cultural geographers to map out “the ways in which not only class and gender, but also race, ethnicity, national identity, and sexuality inform literary representation of peoples and places” (Brosseau 2009: …show more content…
As the geographers focus on the literature of geography (Brosseau’s “Geography’s Literature”), the literary theorists go in a parallel line to talk about the geography or the cartography of literature whose contours are drawn to map out “such complex overlays of real and fictional geographies” in literary genres (Piatti and Hurni 2011: 218). Moreover, as Franco Moretti states, geographical or the cartographical contour of literature “shapes the narrative structure of the European novel” (Moretti 1998: 8). Barbara Piatti distinguishes between the geography of literature and the cartography of literature as the latter “can be looked upon as a sub-discipline or an ancillary science” (Piatti 2009 n.p.). Piatti offers a simple distinction between the two terms as she states that “[w]hile literary geography is the overall topic, literary cartography provides one possible method, more precisely: tools in order to explore and analyse the particular geography of literature” (Piatti 2009 n.p.). Moretti and Piatti are aware of the criticisms stemming from their inevitably reductive and fragmentary method. Piatti replies to these accusations. She points out that the use of abstraction and statistical methods “has to be imagined as a rather complex interplay between text hermeneutics and cartographic rendering” in which a hermeneutic work,