Trace Atlas: Itineraries of Postmodern Literary Space

FAIN: FB-55530-11

Karen S. Jacobs
Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder (Boulder, CO 80303-1058)

Trace Atlas investigates a group of recent theoretical works on space alongside a selection of post-1950 American novels that include photographs, maps, charts, diagrams, architectural drawings, and film stills, as well as a range of textual 'styles' or discursive types. Together, I argue, these works demonstrate a nascent cartographical imagination that comments on changing global relations. While marriages of maps and prose are hardly new, I say "nascent" because the intellectual project that links the diverse postmodern theoretical works and literary experiments I discuss is a project devoted to revisiting the complex migrations across space, time, genre, and culture that have come to define the postmodern moment, and to generating new, if highly provisional, methods of naming, inhabiting, and navigating those migrations. These texts collectively invite us to get lost--to sustain a condition of migrancy that endlessly defers moments of arrival.