Style

The title of this book well represents both the aim of the authors and the final outcome: the meeting of two disciplines, narratology and geography, in the cross-fertilization through bidirectional movement of tools, concepts, and problems. It does not, however, reveal either the full identity of the book or the leitmotiv that glues it together; it is a book about maps and it is itself a map, a map of remapping two disciplines by proposing “space as a key concept for narrative theory, and narrative as a key concept for geography” (225).

It shares a lot of properties (both limiting and promising) with maps, partly because of the close affinity of geography with cartography, and partly because narratology is perceived by the authors as similar to cartography: the former recognizes and makes note only of particular properties of the terrain, the latter is “not the interpretation of individual works but the exploration of regularities found in multiple narrative texts”—those regularities obviously need a distance to be perceivable, a distance of a map.

Let us start with the all-encompassing view of the book, scale: 1:50,000,000. It could be divided in two parts, conceptualizing two motions: first—from geography to narrative; second—from narratology to geography. In the first part, Marie-Laure Ryan examines the topic of space in narrative theory, the role maps play as both extra- and intra-diegetic entities, the usability of the concept of mental maps for narratology, and various functions of space in digital media, particularly “forms of spatiality and … how they lead to new narrative genres and narrative experiences” (11).

In the second part, Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu propose to develop what they perceive as a neglected field of inquiry, namely the narratology of spatial narratives—stories “positioned in the environment … sign-posted and draped across cities, historical sites, and everyday environments” (138) and; consequently, they discuss the narrativity of street names, historical and heritage sites, and museum exhibitions.

The last—extremely valuable—chapter brings together two perspectives and proposes questions and research aims for the future narrative geography and geographical narratology. [End Page 113]

Medium scale, let us say 1:800,000, allows us to see particular chapters. The one entitled “Narrative Theory and Space” provides a “common narratological background” (8) for the rest of the book. Ryan analyzes both “the textual strategies through which space is presented in narrative” and “the spatial categories that underlie [the story’s] semantics” (18). The reader is guided through a rich—though fragmented and scattered—tradition of literary research on space (from Bachtin, Stanzel, and Lotman to Lakoff and Johnson and Deleuze and Guattari) and introduced to distinctions grounded in geographical tradition. Particularly compelling in their simplicity and usefulness are a distinction between a map and a tour (borrowed from Linde and Labov) understood as “global structuring principles of narrative space” (31) and between strategic versus symbolic design, which enables Ryan to argue convincingly (albeit cursorily) with Stanzel’s identifications of perspectivist description with third-person narrative and aperspectivist with first-person.

Two chapters, “Maps and Narrative” and “From Cognitive to Graphic Maps,” read as one coherent argument. The bidirectional movement is repeated on a medium scale: we are presented with maps that are parts of narratives and with narratives that take a form of maps. In the spirit of media-conscious narratology, Ryan asks about the media specificity of narrative maps and limits the type of stories that can be successfully represented through maps: “It takes a narrative based on a steady progression through space to lend itself to this type of spatio-temporal representation” (69).

Three chapters, “Narrative Theory and Space,” “Maps and Narrative,” and “Space, Narrative, and Digital Media,” are full of theoretical distinctions and handy tools and...