INVENTION OF SPACE

This book explores the many ways that space has been represented inliterature in the twentieth century, dealing with concepts related tospace as applied to two different situations: writing the city andtraveling through the world. The first chapters propose an innovativedifferent version of Comparatism, one more akin to issues of centerand periphery, otherness and non hierarchical assumptions, and ageneral discussion of ways to read the city. The following chaptersanalyze how writers create an urban jungle of words with a veryprecise purpose: the critical interpretation of space according to the values of the writer in the present, proffering a quasi-archeological reading of a jumble of temporal traces scrawled on the walls of oldbuildings. This kind of exploration deals with general problems andalso with specific authors and books (Corpus Barga, Cela, Roig, Gil de Biedma, Vilallonga, Rodoreda, Mendoza). The third section is devotedto a discussion of problems put forth by travelogues, focusing onspecific occasions for travel such as the curiosity sparked by the new regime in soviet Russia, how travel is affected by the exileexperience, and the uses of travelogues as a way to rediscover dailylife.