SPATIAL TURN IN LITERARY RESEARCH, ANALYSIS AND READING PRACTICES: PERSPECTIVES AND LIMITATIONS

Article

Abstract

[In English]

A turn toward critically rethinking and theorizing space, has
received a wide scholarly attention, noticeable in multitude of recent
publications on this topic throughout the humanities, especially
in social sciences. Over the last several decades works in
the felds of sociology, cultural geography, anthropology, political
science, history and recently also literary studies have grown increasingly
spatial in their orientation. However, despite these developments
the potential of space as a new heuristic platform for
the feld of literary studies has not been thoroughly explored until
recently.
The following paper serves two purposes: frst of all it aims
at presenting the broad spectrum of scholarly contexts for spatial
reorientation in the feld of literary studies; second, it is designed
as an attempt to critically asses the value and potential applications
of the «spatial turn» in literary studies. The frst section of
the paper charts briefly the general context of spatial turn in the
humanities, presents an overview of conceptual orientations that
infuenced spatial thinking in literary research and refers to some
specifc theoretical solutions that appeared within the held over
time. In the second section the author discusses diferent possible
applications of spatial thinking in literary studies, in relation to
their advantages as well as their limitations. The paper concludes
with a refection upon one of the possible new research !elds,
where the spatial turn may be of great signifcance in relation to
literature, providing new insight into the interdependencies between
space and literary texts.