Topic
Her City, Her Theory: Vilnius in Contemporary Women’s Writing
The paper is based on the idea of paradoxical space by the feminist geographer Gillian Rose (1993). Rose argues that modern Western geographical imagination is dominated by a masculinist discourse that excludes other alternative perspectives. To move beyond it, women must find and explore paradoxical spaces. In paradoxical spaces, the oppositions of body vs. mind, center vs. periphery, and real vs. imaginary merge. The speaking subject occupies both poles simultaneously and gains the ability to share her experience from this new position – one situated beyond masculinist geographical discourse.
In the paper, I propose conceptualizing women's city writing in contemporary Lithuanian literature as a means of creating a paradoxical space in which new experiences and identities – both personal and urban – are explored. Women – and prose writers in particular – only began to feature in Lithuanian modern urban literature in the 21st century. Thus, they enter the center of the Lithuanian literary field both as women and as writers; in other words, they come from a dual periphery, the experience of which they write about. When they write about the city, they do not separate themselves from it – the city and the body appear to be the creations of each other, as Elizabeth Grosz (1992) has suggested.
Moreover, they do not write about the city in the straightforward representational sense. The city is the result of both the writing of space and the reading of text (Hones 2014). It gets its final shape in the imagination of a reader. The paper employs literary cartography to show how this new mode of writing the city corresponds to the reality of Vilnius.
Inga Vidugirytė (Vilnius University)
Inga Vidugirytė is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University. She teaches courses on Comparative East and Central European Literature, Literary Geography, Literary Cartography, and the Culture of Laughter. She is the author of the books "Culture of Laughter" (2012) and "Gogol and the Geographical Imagination of Romanticism" (2018). Between 2011 and 2015, she led the project on digital literary cartography "Vilnius literature". Currently, she focuses on research in women's urban literature, working on the book "Women's City in Contemporary Lithuanian Literature" and mapping city representations in the work of women authors.
Giedrė Beconytė (Vilnius University)
Giedrė Beconytė is a professor at the Institute of Geosciences at Vilnius University. She is a graduate of Vilnius University, earning a diploma in social geography, an MSc in system engineering (informatics), and a PhD. The main courses that she has taught are as follows: database design, the methodology of scientific research, cartographic and GIS project management, cartographic communication and logical methods. Her research interests include spatial information infrastructure, spatial analysis focusing on the geography of crime, thematic maps and mental maps. She is the author of over 50 research papers, thematic maps, textbooks and graphic design projects.