{"id":7316,"date":"2013-09-15T12:05:50","date_gmt":"2013-09-15T11:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/?p=7316"},"modified":"2013-09-15T12:07:06","modified_gmt":"2013-09-15T11:07:06","slug":"new-publications-the-spatial-turn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/2013\/09\/15\/new-publications-the-spatial-turn\/","title":{"rendered":"New publications: the spatial turn"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a couple of recent publications to announce. The first is on Shalamov:\u00a0\u2018Mapping Space as Factography: Human Traces and Negated Genres in Varlam Shalamov\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0Kolymskie rasskazy<\/a>,\u2019\u00a0Slavonica<\/em>, 19.1 (April 2013), 1-17 ) (\u00a3). The second, co-authored with John Levin<\/a>, is \u00a0\u2018Mapping Machines: Transformations of the Petersburg Text\u2019, The Spatial Turn in Literary Studies<\/em>,\u00a0Primerjalna knji\u017eevnost<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Comparative Literature)\u00a036.2 (2013). The latter is the first publication of research from our\u00a0Mapping St Petersburg<\/a> project, and you can read a bit more about this and other developments on the site (including some new maps of Crime and Punishment\u00a0<\/em>that we discuss in the article)\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The two articles relate to very different projects, and for a long time the different strands of my research seemed largely unconnected beyond the significance of Dostoevsky to both, or all of them, and I’ve often worried about my research lacking coherence for that reason. But increasingly I see how recurring themes and ideas are bringing aspects of my work together in rather unexpected ways. One such theme is performance, which was fairly central to my book\u00a0Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative. <\/em>In quite a different context, it’s the subject of a forthcoming article comparing the representation of criminals in nineteenth- and twentieth-century prison\/hard labour narratives, appearing in a collection of essays based on papers from last year’s conference on Russian prison experience in Uppsala<\/a>. I’m also currently working on an article about Petersburg narratives that also focuses on motifs of performance, developing a paper I gave at the BASEES conference last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That article on Petersburg will also link the question of performance to the spatial dimension, which is another major preoccupation, and central to both new publications. Clearly Mapping St Petersburg is based on ideas about the exploration of space in literary texts, but until recently it hadn’t really registered as a significant aspect of my katorga<\/em>\/Gulag research. That may seem surprising, given the importance of Siberia to the \u00a0project, but most of my ideas have in fact dealt with questions of interiority and identity, and geography has generally played a lesser role than I expected.<\/p>\n

My Shalamov article changes that somewhat. It addresses two aspects of the spatial dimension of\u00a0Kolyma Tales <\/em>that both derive from the loss of the sense of time in the camps: the network created by the non-chronological arrangement of the stories and the connections between tales that are distant from each other in both time and space; and the uses of space as a metaphor for writing, notably in the recurring motif of surveying and mapping the Kolyma region. To develop these questions further (and investigate the connections with my other project in more detail), I’m thinking about network visualizations of the stories, and currently working on a map to interrogate the geography of Shalamov’s stories, However, progress is slow, as some of the camps and places he mentions are proving very elusive (if anyone can provide any information on the location of Chernaia rechka – a camp in Kolyma, not the area in Petersburg where Pushkin had his duel – I’d be enormously grateful).<\/p>\n

Two more articles are imminent: one on seeing trauma in Vasily Grossman’s late work, from the Oxford conference marking the BBC’s production of Life and Fate<\/a>, and a long-awaited one on conceptions of peasant convicts in katorga\u00a0<\/em>narratives, from the Villains and Victims conference<\/a> in Nottingham. More on these when they appear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a couple of recent publications to announce. The first is on Shalamov:\u00a0\u2018Mapping Space as Factography: Human Traces and Negated Genres in Varlam Shalamov\u2019s\u00a0Kolymskie rasskazy,\u2019\u00a0Slavonica, 19.1 (April 2013), 1-17 ) (\u00a3). The second, co-authored with John Levin, is \u00a0\u2018Mapping Machines: Transformations of the Petersburg Text\u2019, The Spatial Turn in Literary Studies,\u00a0Primerjalna knji\u017eevnost\u00a0(Comparative Literature)\u00a036.2 (2013). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[91,528,27,529,489,7,41],"class_list":["post-7316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gulag","category-russian-literature","tag-crime-and-punishment","tag-dostoevsky","tag-grossman","tag-gulag","tag-kolyma","tag-shalamov","tag-st-petersburg"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2MwXo-1U0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7316"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7336,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7316\/revisions\/7336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}