Monatshefte

Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu's book lays out analytical language to explain the interplay of narrative and space. Foregrounding theory and methods, the authors are upfront about the fact that their study does not offer close readings of any single text. Instead, they bring together narrative theory and geography to produce a useful roadmap for conducting research on narrative space and spatialized narratives across a wide range of subjects, locations, and media: literature, illustration, film and television, computer and video games, city streets and commemorative landscapes, and museums.

The first half of the book focuses on the spatial turn in narrative theory while the rest addresses narrative theories of objects found in real-world spaces and places. The first chapters provide concise working definitions of space and place without getting bogged down in scholarly debates on these terms. As one works through the book, each chapter adds on typologies, such as tour, map, container, emotional and strategic space, as well as hybrid conceptions of how narrative can be spatialized.

This idea of strategic space is developed productively throughout the book. The authors observe that most approaches to space refer to a metaphorical sense of space rather than investigate strategic, purpose-driven uses of space and how characters and objects are situated and move in a fictional setting in a story (17). In Chapter Three, for instance, the authors use maps and verbal texts to show how approaches that draw upon cartography and narrative theory can be more productive than space-only or verbal-only approaches. Maps cannot easily convey what it is like to live in an unfamiliar location, while a verbal description of the location cannot convey "a network of relations between objects" one might encounter there (45). To prove their point about strategic space, they evaluate a number of cases in which reading the space in maps and literature intersect. When working with literature, a writer can introduce a "map of spatial form," which requires reflection about the story in order to visualize [End Page 120] narrative space. The creation of a reader's map while working through a story aids the interpretation of plot and characterization. And if we take more distance from the immediate verbal narrative, we can attempt to figure out how actual locations from the plots of literary works are set in real-life geographies by consulting printed maps or navigating the spaces themselves. Both activities of research and mapmaking uncover strategic and symbolic meaning, which would be otherwise difficult to discern in literary texts alone. While this procedure might be productive in some cases, the authors observe that maps can be useless for readers. The map in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels does not help us retrace the plot due to its scale and discrepancies. In this instance, they continue, the map ultimately fails because correspondences between the map and the story are largely irrelevant and are unimportant for descriptions of the culture and the novel's plot (52). By contrast, Robert Louis Stevenson's map for Treasure Island gives us a productive way to think about the creative process (54). As such, the authors model how to critically work with maps and the literature they accompany.

Their deliberation of maps continues in Chapter Five, in which the authors turn to spatiality in multiplayer online games and in digital maps. While digital documents may not have obvious spatial character except for the physical computers and devices in which their data are stored (101), the authors explore how spatial metaphors help us imagine how information is organized and how we gain access to it through hypertexts, in "windows," and "cyberspace." As in the other parts of the book, the authors provide terms to think about the complexity of narration and space required for users of digital media. The game world in Ms. PacMan has a typical strategic design, which is task-based and viewed from overhead; World of Warcraft employs more sophisticated realism and a slightly elevated horizontal point of view, which, in their opinion, results in an enhanced sense of being in a place. Furthermore, the authors are particularly fascinated by how mobile technology, GPS, and augmented reality engage user interaction in the real, physical world. In their opinion, positioning technology and crowd-sourcing encourages a type of democratic narrative in which participants may congregate around actual and virtual spaces to create stories and share them with others through mobile technology.

After this transitional chapter on mobile technology, the second half of the book takes us away from "the printed page, video screen, and the worlds of digital media" to focus on experiential, real-world environments (138). In Chapter Seven, the authors identify spatial narratives that underpin historic heritage sites, such as sequential narratives, linear arrangements, chronological progression, aerial narratives, and hybrid mixtures of all these types. By identifying these underlying structures, the authors show how signs, roadside markers, memorials, and other displays convey stories and information about these sites in a spatial and temporal manner. In so doing, they are concerned with the how, the manner of narration, and not its content, the what. In other words, the authors of the book are not interested in how politics and ideologies underwrite decisions to name (and rename) streets and battlegrounds as much as in the underlying rhetorical structure of these locations. Museum exhibitions tell stories, unavoidably political and cultural narratives, which unfold for visitors as narratives within an architectural space. Rather than provide a detailed treatment of the political culture associated with museum-going in these settings, the authors maintain their structural focus and explain how architects and curators designed exhibitions. The [End Page 121] formal language the authors develop for examining museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, might disappoint those wellacquainted with Museum Studies scholarship.

In the final chapter, the authors sketch out future directions for digital and spatial humanities scholarship in areas such as literary cartography, cognitive mapping, human geography, or in film, graphic novels, or computer games. After an initial read-through, it is better to turn to sections of this book based on what one needs for a concise overview for undergraduate or graduate teaching. Or one could use the volume as a starting point for a research project; the bibliography has good leads for digging deeper into debates on narrative theory and geography. It seems to be with this intention that the authors encourage readers new to the field—not those who have followed the exceptionally innovative and foundational work by scholars such as Robert Tally, Tom Conley, or even Marie-Laure Ryan—to theorize media and space. While the typologies they introduce might be tedious for some readers, this volume is essential for the new directions in geocriticism it will certainly inspire.