The Comparative Literature Department is pleased to announce our upcoming Kempf lecture by Professor Tamar Abramov (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), titled On Maps and Imaginary Islands. The lecture will be held on Thursday, March 26 at 5:30pm in HQ 136.
Abstract
What does it mean for literature to have the world become fully mapped, all horizons charted and no blank spaces remaining on the globe? My lecture investigates the evolving relationship between fictional travel literature and exploration from the 18th century to the early 20th. It looks at three important instants in the process of geographical mapping and at their literary correlates and offers a reading of the transformations in fictional travel writing during that period. These transformations are symptoms of what I call the literary resistance to science. Indeed, if the drive to map can be called “science”, then the texts I will focus on in the lecture resist the enclosure of their horizon by geographical mapping and offer, in its stead, a place beyond maps. This place I will call the place of literature and it is where adventures of a poetic kind take place.
