Description
Engaging the compelling example of Philippe Soupault’s surrealist novel Last Nights in Paris, this paper examines how literature, a primary form of representation of human reality, can be seen as capable of mapping the qualities of a city, revealing aspects that we tend to ignore in analytical and scientific tools of representation. It seeks to answer how the literary language can ‘cartograph’ the qualities of the urban space that speak about the “essence” and character of the city, its moods and its atmospheres, its neighborhoods and its architecture, thus revealing the poetic nature of the urban terrain approximating space as perceived. In this endeavor, literature’s capacity for poetic expression (O. Paz) offers the means for mapping less conventional concepts rooted in emotion that are crucial for the representation of the geophysical terrains of the city, their spatial boundaries and the areas of transition among them.The particularity of the novel under examination (which Soulpaut insisted in characterizing as “testimony” because it describes the actual city of Paris) is that the urban environment of the city is presented through the protagonists’ walking and wondering around. Despite the fact that walking is usually seen as a practice foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual or panoptic constructions (M. de Certeau), the paper argues that it is capable of revealing ‘another spatiality’ of the urban fabric, enriching the geographical horizons of architecture by focusing on the existing elements of a place and how they invest it with meaning. In the light of this approach, architecture is seen as capable of acknowledging that meanings are inherent in the phenomenal experience of a place, and its importance lies in bringing them to the foreground and intensifying them
| Period | 2012 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lincoln, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |