Spatial Perception and Genre Borders

European Netias Lecture by Merja Polvinen, Senior Lecturer in English Philology, University of Helsinki, Finland

  • Date: 22 OCTOBER 2020  from 17:00 to 19:00

  • Event location: Online event

  • Type: Lectures

How do readers imagine the places and spaces of fiction? What kinds of qualities of text encourage us to generate spatial imaginations, and what makes such imaginations "vivid"? What happens when texts turn our assumptions and imaginings inside out? I approach these questions via China Miéville's conceptual thriller The City & The City (2009), a story of two urban communities that maintain a border as unassailable as the Berlin Wall, but which consists only of conceptual and perceptual actions.

 

Merja Polvinen

Senior Lecturer in English Philology, University of Helsinki, Finland

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