'Literature, Territoriality, and the Embodied Mind' - May Reading Group Session

This session on 'Literature, Territoriality, and the Embodied Mind' will be led by Sarah O'Malley, a PhD student from the School of English. Sarah has kindly provided the below introduction to the topic and selected two readings which will be circulated to all on the mailing list ahead of the session:

I am interested in the relationship between gender identity and landscape, and specifically how they are connected through the gendered discourse used to represent landscapes in the seventeenth century. In order to help me explore this connection I have begun to construct a theoretical framework using Claude Raffestin’s relational approach to territoriality alongside some current critical discourse in the field of early modern literary studies around embodiment and the embodied mind. I am particularly interested in Raffestin’s idea of ‘produced geography’, and in connection with ideas of the embodied mind, how in an early modern context gendered notions of the body and bodily boundaries may have worked to help produce early modern conceptions of landscape and territory, and vice versa. I have included an article by Raffestin that outlines his approach to territoriality, and also an article to introduce the idea of the embodied mind in a seventeenth-century context.

• Raffestin, Claude, ‘Space, Territory, and Territoriality’, Society and Space, 30 (2012), pp. 121-141
• Sutton, John, ‘Spongy Brains and Material Memories’, in Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., eds., Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 14-34

This is the final session of the academic year, so it would be great to see some regular faces one last time before the summer break!