Those who study the representation of space and place in literature are well aware of the debt this subfield owes to work done in the social sciences. Many of the most exciting recent developments in this burgeoning area of literary studies have involved an interdisciplinary turn toward themes and analytic tools that borrow from fields like cultural and social geography, urban sociology, environmental studies, and the phenomenology of place. Such tools have greatly enriched the study of literary space. But what does literature have to offer in return? That is, how can the literary study of space and place contribute to the work being done in these other fields and in so doing enrich our broader understanding of and interactions with the natural and built environments through which we move? How can we, as literary critics, build on these developments, helping to bring literature into the larger conversation on space and place? My answers to these questions will be centered on a consideration of Bertrand Westphal’s La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace.1 Informed by postmodern, postcolonial, and poststructuralist theories of space, Westphal’s book argues forcefully for the strategic role that imaginative literature plays in a world marked irrevocably by postmodern epistemological and ideological uncertainty.
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