Topic
Her City, Her Theory: Reframing Urbanity in Contemporary Women’s Writing
The impulse for the presentation stems from distant reading (Moretti 2005, 2013) of Vilnius literature, enabled by the practice of digital literary cartography applied to the analysis of space in works created over the last 35 years. Novels and collections of essays or short stories chart their own territories of the city, which, when projected onto the city's map, allow us to see and compare differences in the representation of actual space for the city's imaginaries across authors and works over time. To interpret these differences, we use the notion of the shape of narrative space that Moretti (2005, 35-38) proposes in his analysis of the circular space of village stories that have recently been destroyed. The maps of the narrated space allow us to see the reshaping of the actual space over time and to ask what forces are responsible for these changes. In his analysis, Moretti concludes that the historical forces - the development of roads, the national market, and new ideas were the reason why the circular shape of the village has gone forever. We apply the same analytical steps in reading Vilnius literature. Maps of the narrated space in works by different authors help us see the range of changes in the fictional space over time and suggest a tendency of these changes. In interpretation, we shift from distant to close reading, seeking answers in the works themselves.
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.