The epoch of space. State and new perspectives
For centuries, the study of time was one of the main academic interests in the field of Humanities. However, in the second half of the 20th century, most scholars and philosophers shifted their focus to the question of space. This, termed “spatial turn” by Soja in 1989, encouraged the foundation of new approaches and perspectives whose main goal was to elucidate the “spatiality” (Tally, 2013) of beings as a result of their interaction with their physical surroundings.
Even though this new “era of space” was explicitly acknowledged and labelled as such (“l’époque de l’espace”) by Foucault in 1967, Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique de l’espace, published in 1958, proved to be a turning point in the development of this perspective. In this work, Bachelard explores the experiences that result from human interactions with architecture through what the author termed “topoanalysis”: a method that uses psychology as a research tool for the study of the spaces and places that we inhabit.
The interest in studying this in the field of the arts has increased significantly in recent years, and is especially noticeable in the case of literary creations. Scholars today –particularly comparatists– are paying more attention to the rediscovered relevance and symbolic value of the geographic connections present in literary works. Likewise, the links between human beings and their physical surroundings stand out as a significant matter of study in the … READ MORE