Abstract  

Allegory, one might posit, is inherently spatial, insofar as the establishment of an “other” meaning for a given text will involve matters of place and displacement, dislocation, and dispersal, as well as hierarchies of meaning that may be imagined in architectural or topographical terms. In this talk, Robert T. Tally Jr. will discuss the significance of allegory for spatial literary studies, broadly speaking. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson, Tally examines the ways that literary texts serve as cognitive maps that not only figuratively chart the social spaces represented, but also offer inherently spatial allegories by which to make sense of their world. The spaces in question are not necessarily geographical, but are often established as relations (e.g., interior-exterior, public-private, high-low, here-there, and so on). Tally will look at Lu Xun’s 1918 short story “Diary of a Madman,” as well as Jameson’s discussion of it, in order to illustrate these connections. In the situation of the diary and its reading, Lu Xun’s tale evokes different aspects of spatial allegory, which in turn suggest multiple pathways for literary cartography and its study.

Biography

Robert T. Tally Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of many books, including Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019); Spatiality (2013); Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013), and the edited collection, the Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017), each of which is now available in Chinese translation. Tally is also the general editor of “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,” a Palgrave Macmillan book series.