The Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald team will explore literary geography via the development of interactive mappings of places, spaces, and events.
“How does MacDonald – an artist whose work promotes feminist, queer, decolonial, and intersectional politics – construct a geographical imaginary?”
– Neta Gordon, Project Principal Investigator
Why are we mapping literature?
Literary geography is relevant to Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald, not only because of what might be called MacDonald’s geographic imagination – her abiding interest in relational and contingent strategies of orienting and making room for oneself in a particular time and place – but as a means for scholarly reorientation as well.
This project aims to highlight MacDonald’s invitational, hospitable, and popular approach to challenging political and cultural norms, while constructing similarly accessible forms of literature scholarship, using methods associated with literary geography. The creation and analysis of maps is an interdisciplinary form of literary geography, with many ways to ask new questions, such as:
How is geography represented in literature, or the mapping of identifiable locations and routes described in a literary text;
How can the geography of literature, or the mapping of various literary “events” of writing and reading highlight previously unexplored themes and patterns;
How can geo-critical approaches, or the mapping of literary representation of larger or smaller scaled relational and contingent spaces re-centre often marginalized perspectives;
How does creative cartography, or the mapping or visualization of literary formal devices invite interdisciplinary studies?
Research Pathways
Collaborative Reading and Literary Data Collection
Creating digital tools to emulate the activity of literary close reading in a collaborate environment, to produce integrated, qualitative critical analysis.
Developing an Interactive Map Interface
Visualizing the geography of literature, or the mapping of various literary “events,” both in literature and of writing and reading.
Conference Presentations
Sharing process oriented discoveries about purpose-built tools and methods, as well as on the feminist approach to collaborative knowledge-production.
Digital Publications
Considering Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald as a case-study for new modes of analysis and knowledge mobilization in Canadian Literary Studies.