Semantic Spaces, or Toward a Poetic Geographic

1. Semantic Spaces, orToward a Poetic Geographic Nasser Hussain Literary Dynamics of Place Symposium Durham 2011

2. ‘argue that the material concerns of Soja’s postmodern geography coincide with the materiality of language (exemplified by site-specific practices like Antin’s), and that the linguistic turn (rooted in analytic philosophy and further entrenched in the humanities) can account for the interplay between identity and location as they intersect across the disciplines of geography and literature.’

3. ‘The focus of literary theory…must be on the performative powers of language, and not on the non-linguistic, that is to say, historical and aesthetic consideration’

4. ‘Metaphorizing the transformations of discourse in a vocabulary of time necessarily leads to the utilisation of the model of individual consciousness with its intrinsic temporality. Endeavouring on the other hand to decipher discourse through the use of spatial, strategic metaphors enables one to grasp precisely the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power.’

7. REAL ISM

9. as i saw them go i realized that i was sure they were lovers and i got this assurance from the way the old man touched her her hair and her shoulder and from the way they shared their physical space together which from the way they shared it somewhat more than affectionately i was sure was an erotic space the living physical space of lovers and as i drove off to where I was going near fortieth street i wondered what country they came from and I realized that it was difficult for me to tell because all this time i didn’t know what language we were speaking because all of the time we were talking together we were not speaking any language i knew we were speaking a language something like several languages i knew a language i obviously couldn’t speak they couldn’t speak my language and i couldn’t speak theirs but in spite of that we managed to speak and their language was something like italian something like russian and there were a lot of slavic words in it i could understand and it had a lot of a kind of latin in it and i figured maybe wed been talking rumanian

10. and so blue lies very close to the abstraction pole of the feature axis concrete/abstract when it is seen from this point of view which is a consideration when you’re considering how close something seems to be to something else and even then we don’t know how close but forget that how close the question that is more important is where we are standing im standing were standing youre standing somewhere facing somewhere in this semantic space if there is such a thing as semantic space we are standing in it because there is no looking without standing sitting? somewhere with your eyes looking out of the front of your head and not behind it

11. these utterances “mean” something that is in whatever space they exist they form a representation of these conceptions or they refer in some manner to this set of conceptions which constitute some kind of reality to which they may refer as say a map some kind of map which another person if he understands or she understands this text or these utterances recognizes as a map and knows the rules for using that map so that he could orient himself to the space referred to by that map and go to the same terrain in other words if you take my map and your map and you superimpose them on each other the two maps are the same and accordingly I could take your map superimpose my map on it and it would deviate very little from your map