Space, Spatiality, Literature
Description
It has often been said that the end of the nineteenth century marked the rise of studies of space and spatiality over time and temporality. And yet one of the central problems we persistently encounter in literary criticism is how to talk about space without reducing it simply to the background against which the drama of the characters’ life choices is displayed. In most readings, space is merely an inert background or conceptual wallpaper, and contributes very little to the analysis, unless of course it is in the genre of science fiction or fantasy, in which case space becomes central to our understanding of what is most important within the text. In one of the more spatially sensitive accounts of literature, Joseph Frank argues in The Idea of Spatial Form (1991) that the foregrounding of spatial form over causal chronological order in narrative texts is an essential phenomenon of modernist avant-garde literature associated with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and various others of the early twentieth century European literary tradition. The basic argument of “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”, the most influential essay in Frank’s book which was first published on its own ahead of the volume in 1945, is that modernist literary works are “spatial” insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity that disrupts the normal continuities of prose narrative with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. There have been updates to the principles of spatial form since Frank's seminal contribution, not least of which is the increasing salience of Mikhail Bakhtin's work on chronotopes. Works such as Robert Tally's Topophrenia and edited collection Spatial Literary Studies have served to update the main debates. But the central problem that still remains is how to devise a methodological and conceptual toolkit by which to interpret both literary space and actually existing space in relation of mutual illumination. For this, we need to go beyond Frank and Bakhtin to encompass an interdisciplinary set of perspectives, including from philosophy (Heidegger, Foucault), phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), as well as critical geography and urban studies (Edward Soja, David Harvey, Mike Davis, Camilla Hawthorne), among various others.
Our objective in this seminar series is to explore a conceptual and methodological toolkit for defining space and spatility drawing from a wide range of literary and urban examples in World Literature and the Global South. Illustrative examples will be drawn from Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg, as well as various texts from postcolonial literature.
Schedule
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Speaker Bio
Tolulope Akinwole is an assistant professor of in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia
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Utitofon Inyang is an Assistant Professor of African Literature and Culture in State University of New York (SUNY) Binghamton. Her work, focused in African and global Black literature and culture, explores the worlding practices in African and Afro-diasporic cultural forms. Her monograph, Like a Masquerade Dancing: Visuospatial Geographies in Nigerian and Afro Diasporic Literature presents a theory of indigenous spatiality in Nigerian and Afro-Diasporic literature and art forms.
Speaker Bio
Dr Penny Cartwright is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University of Oxford. She is currently working on a project about the ‘culture’ concept in post-1970s Anglophone African, UK and Irish fiction, focusing on the context of global culture commodification. Her first monograph is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (January 2026) and she has published previous work in Ariel, Research in African Literatures, Interventions and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
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Shengke DENG is an undergraduate in philosophy at Tsinghua University. His research focuses on cultural studies and contemporary French theory, particularly the work of Deleuze, Foucault, Latour, Derrida, and Butler, with interests in subjectivity, spatial politics, and the aesthetics of digital media and video games. He presented at the 2025 ICLA Congress with a paper entitled “Crisis of Subjectivity in Technological Networks: Bruno Latour and Impersonal Generation in the Digital Age.”
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Sophie Feng is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature, where she is finishing her dissertation titled "Undone Bodies, Undoing Cartography: Mapping the Intersections of Trauma and Vulnerability in Contemporary Canadian and Québécois Literature." Her recent work appears in the edited collections Shelter in Text: Essays on Dwelling and Refuge (U of Alberta P, 2025) and Beyond Resilience in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences: Research on Critical Terms (Routledge, 2026).
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Eric Prieto is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, co-editor of Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, and Resistance, and an editor of the Literary Urban Studies List at Palgrave-Macmillan. His newest book, Urban Informality and Literary Form, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2026.
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Mpho is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Stanford Department of English with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE). She is a 2025-2026 Susan Ford Dorsey Africa Innovation Fellow at the Stanford Center for African Studies. Before coming to Stanford, Mpho earned a BA in English at Yale University.
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Assistant Professor of English at Tripura University in the North-East of India. Completed MPhil on the spaces of resistance in the works of Mahasweta Devi at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
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Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and English at Stanford University, where he is also the inaugural Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. He is the author of 6 monographs and 10 edited collections, including the award-winning Oxford Street, Accra (Duke UP, 2014) and Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge UP, 2021). Forthcoming in 2026 is Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation: Tragedy, Space, and Literary Studies, and Exile and Diaspora in African Literature, 1960-2020 (ed.) both from Cambridge University Press. He is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.