113th Annual Conference - Portland, Oregon
Friday, November 6 - Sunday, November 8, 2015

Architecture, Space, and Literature I

Session Chair: 
John M. Ganim, UC Riverside
Time: 
Session 3: Friday 2:00-3:30pm
Location: 
Willamette (PMCC)
Topic Area: 
Architecture, Space, and Literature

Presenters/Papers:

  1. Ekphrasis and Cognitive Maps in Guillermo Fadanelli’s Hotel DF
    Craig Epplin, Portland State University
    Guillermo Fadanelli’s 2010 novel Hotel DF functions as a cognitive map of Mexico City. It suggests a new model for understanding the relationship between space and text. Rather than collapsing the two terms together, as is common today, he maintains distance between them through ekphrastic narration.
  2. Yi-Fu Tuan’s Coming Home to China (2007): Interrogating the Story of Ourselves Through Traveling Bodies, Spaces, Homes, and Mixed Geographies. 
    Jean Amato, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York
    In his 2007 memoir Coming Home to China, the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan illustrates how the representation of the ancestral home is a fluid, two-way process of affiliation that is simultaneously local and global, private and public, symbolic and material, individual and communal, and in dialogue with past and present.
  3. Odes on Oysters, Poems on Pillars: Literary Experiences of Chang’an’s Daxingshan Monastery in 8th and 9th century China
    Alexei Ditter, Reed College
    This paper examines literary writings produced on or within the environs of the Daxingshan Monastery of 8th and 9th century Chang’an, examining how the literary traces of earlier visitors shaped the experiences of later ones as well as ways in which communication of experiences of place were mediated by genre.
  4. The Facts and Fictions of 9/11: Memories, Museums, and Memorials
    Kristine Miller, Utah State University
    This paper connects the rhetoric of commemorative storytelling with iconography of physical structures by analyzing memorialization in post-9/11 New York.  The paper compares sound recordings (from Columbia's 9/11 Oral History Project) with fiction and journalism (Amy Waldman’s The Submission and “Portraits of Grief”) and physical spaces (9/11 Memorial and Museum). 
Session Cancelled: 
No