The Spatial Turn, Literary Studies, and Slovenian Literature: An Introductory Outline

Despite its often postmodern articulation, the spatial turn, which was conjectured by Foucault in the midst of structuralism's heyday and announced by Soja and Jameson in their criticisms of postmodernity and late capitalism at the beginning of the 1990s, is productive for literary studies as a remaking of Kant's failed attempt to base the entire body of knowledge on the scientific foundations of geography and anthropology, and as an improvement of methods of historical contextualization of literature through complex conceptions that include the dialectics of the polycausal relations between the elements of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. From the viewpoint of literary studies, the spatial turn therefore cannot be regarded as a change in the "master paradigm" of all the humanities and social sciences, as argued by Soja, but only as a change in the epistemic dominant. This article presents three examples of appropriating spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in research on the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systematic analysis of genre development and the spatial diffusion of genres using analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary culture spaces (Valdes, Neubauer, Dominguez, etc.). It concludes by presenting the research project "Prostor slovenske literarne kulture: literarna zgodovina in prostorska analiza z geografskim informacijskim sistemom" (The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis) carried out by ZRC SAZU and the Ljubljana Faculty of Arts under the author's leadership. The project uses GIS technologies to map and analyze data on the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to demonstrate how interaction between "spaces in literature" and "literature in spaces" has historically established a nationalized and esthetically differentiated literary field.