Book Reviews
Issue 33.1 Spring 2005 (Online Exclusive)
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Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference, by Nedra Reynolds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 224 pages.
Reviewed by James Fredal, The Ohio State University
Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
—Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”
Like most logical (or alogical) systems, Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia relies on spatial relations and structural metaphors (“celestial” and “emporium,” not unlike our “low culture” or “magazine”) to describe what is known and how it is packaged. Metaphors of space, structures, bodies, and movement are nearly indispensable for talking about what we know and how it is contained. We have “areas” of study in which students need to demonstrate “coverage” and whose “frontiers” are explored by “leading” scholars at the “forefront” of their “fields.” What is known (invention) and how it is packaged (arrangement and style) likewise get coded in terms of space, structure, and movement. Arguments and texts stake “claims,” need “support,” and “build” to a thesis which must be “unpacked”; authors make “points” or go off on “tangents” or in “circles”; readers get “stuck” or need “signposts.”
The metaphors work because reading and writing is like moving through space: both take time and introduce changing perceptions. Reading “feels like” moving with the thoughts of the author, getting “inside” their heads. But writing and reading also require and invoke bodies and places (both mental and physical) that can be visited, lived in, and explored. In fact, the metaphors are more like metonyms since they merely replace one set of spatial/structural frames (the discourse, the text, eye scan) for another (the field, the edifice, exploration).
But the metaphor only goes so far, and can sometimes confuse. Physical bodies in space cannot leap from one point to another without traversing all the ground in between. But ideas can. The sudden leaps of novice writers or practiced postmoderns can confuse, entertain, or illuminate, but they always surprise. When this “movement” seems too rapid and unpredictable so that the writing “jumps,” readers are reminded of their desire for “coherence” and “flow.” The Celestial Emporium remains a wonder not because the items are random or unconnected (they aren’t) but because the connections are so unexpected and unfamiliar.
Reading Nedra Reynolds’ Geographies of Writing brings the “Celestial Emporium” to mind not only because Reynolds addresses the connections between composition, rhetoric, and space so broadly (I might say encyclopedically), but also because of how the book itself is arranged. On the one hand, Reynolds offers to her readers a full panoply of important scholars, concepts, and terms in the study of space and place: she cites Henri Lefebvre, Gaston Bachelard, Yi-Fu Tuan, Derek Gregory, Doreen Massey, Linda McDowell, Martin Heidegger, Michel DeCerteau, and J. B. Harvey, and others; and she parses terms like flaneur, thirdspace, habitus, streetwork, mapping, the itinerary, inhabitance, and the like.
On the other hand, anyone expecting a logical (or chronological) “tour” through the study of space as it concerns rhetoric and composition will be disappointed. Reynolds’s Borgesian work can seem at times thoroughly alogical (not illogical); it surprises by its juxtapositions, and feels at times more like an informed “ramble” than it does a fully “structured” and “supported” argument from the mount of which we might survey this new field. It is an itinerary rather than a map, and an itinerary that jumps and points out, but rarely “constructs” or “covers,” and returns to home base (of composition studies) only occasionally.
In Reynolds’s travel, we find transcriptions of interviews (of geography students on their mental map of Leeds), high theory (Lefebvre and Soja on spatial trialectics), personal essay (memories of growing up with five siblings in a small house), and local history (of street activisim in Detroit) all sharing a small space. Methods are mixed and matched, emporium style. She discusses the time-space compression of digital technology; she reviews critical and feminist geographers, she introduces the literary flaneur as a social type; and she presents interviews of students in Leeds to show how factors of identity and background shape students’ use and representations of space. There are, in fact, few methods or concepts in the cultural study of space that Reynolds does not mention.
In all this, Reynolds herself plays the role of the flaneur that she describes: the pedestrian voyeur and chronicler of everyday urban life, one “who immerses [herself] in the bath of the crowd, gathers impressions and jots them down.” She is “interested in experience rather than knowledge,” “observes the habits of everyone,” and presents herself as an artist of seeing, collecting, and chronicling, only occasionally tying her observations directly to the study and teaching of rhetoric and writing as it is traditionally understood. Yet she remains clearly deliberate about the path that she is leading us down. For example, in the final chapter of the book, Reynolds suggests that “geographies of rhetoric and writing begin with the assertion that the way we map the world is a direct but complex result of gender, race, class, and abilities . . . affecting how we walk through a neighborhood, choose an apartment, find our way across campus, or navigate texts or acts of literacy” (140, my emphasis). Someone expecting texts to be like structures might be disconcerted to see this talk of beginning (with the central topic of the work) in the final chapter. Reynolds responds that this only shows how “the ways in which we imagine space and place have a direct impact on how we imagine writing” such that “spatial metaphors can begin to dominate to the exclusion of materiality” (27). Only if you are wedded to the writing-as-structure model will you be disconcerted by such a late “beginning.” But this is not the only way to understand texts, and is only a metaphoric understanding, after all. More importantly, it is the very process of examining our metaphors alongside of (and never independent of) our actual spatial practices that we discover the spatial biases in our reading and writing practices.
Others might find Reynolds spending too much time on new terrain (like critical geography) and too little time laying out the relevance of space studies to composition and literacy. How, we might ask, does “the way we map the world . . . affect . . . acts of literacy?” Here, too, Reynolds anticipates the problem, pointing to the ways in which “composition’s push toward disciplinarity” can make boundaries more rigid, and crossing them less welcome (27). She spends too little time on composition or literacy only to the degree that we already consider spatial practices and plans alien to the work of writing. Trust me, she seems to say, and keep going. Repaying that trust, Reynolds offers richly detailed accounts of a wide variety of space work for her audience.
But, in fact, she says little about how the actual writing or reading process might be influenced by spatial factors, so that consternation over the contents and arrangement of the work are not entirely out of place. Not everyone appreciates imagined Chinese encyclopedias or the ruminations of the flaneur when what they want is a floor plan or logical structure. Many of Reynolds’ observations remain abstract and only loosely connected to supporting evidence. Is it true that how we map the world results directly from our gender, class, race, ability? Perhaps, but Reynolds shows more interest in moving on from this claim to another than she does in demonstrating the validity of either or in showing how the two are connected. And even given her interest in questioning and expanding how we conceive of rhetoric and composition, the long stretches of discussion about cultural geography and mental maps leave much translation work to a composition audience.
Where the connections are made explicit, they can still surprise. In a discussion of the important spatial metaphors employed within composition (the frontier, cyberspace, borderlands, travel), Reynolds gives ample space to the “city” metaphor (one I hadn’t thought of as especially important in the teaching of writing) but little to the notion of discourse communities which, she argues “did not last long as an imagined geography because its spaces were just too limited” (32).
As Reynolds acknowledges, unfamiliar texts are more difficult to inhabit and explore (164-65). And this text does pose challenges to compositionists hoping to learn about the relevance of space and place to writing. But the challenges are worthwhile. Anyone in rhetoric and composition hoping to gain a broad exposure to studies of space and place would be well advised to begin with Geographies of Writing.
Columbus, OH
