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.