Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky

Is literature even mappable? In exploring the cartographic components of literature, the contributors have not only brought literary theory to bear on the map but have also enriched the vocabulary and perspectives of literary studies with cartographic terms.

The literary map is not merely an illustrative guide but represents a set of relations and tensions that raise questions about representation, fiction, and space. Generously illustrated with full-color maps and visualizations, it offers the first systematic overview of an emerging approach to the study of literature. This book gathers leading scholars to consider the relationship of literature and cartography. Today, the convergence of digital mapping and globalization has spurred a cartographic turn in literature. Literary authors have frequently called on elements of cartography to ground fictional space, to visualize sites, and to help readers get their bearings in the imaginative world of the text. These thematic and formal properties enable the text to construct a world-knowledge that presents readers with an alternative to extant globalization narratives insofar as it resists their drive towards a comprehension of the planet in terms of completeness, homogenization, abstraction, and totalization.

It then shows how Atlas’s literary-visual form foregrounds selectiveness, inexhaustibility, and heterogeneity, and demonstrates the text’s relative independence from the need to organize places and events through a narrative progression in time and space. The article analyzes how Schalansky’s short prose texts develop an alterity-oriented world-knowledge. The article analyzes the text’s propositional world-knowledge as it appears on a discursive level as well as its non-propositional world-knowledge as produced through the text’s aesthetic form. Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands (Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln, 2009) constructs an alternative knowledge of the world in a globalization age.

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky