Date: Tue, 07 Jul 1998 15:42:50 -0400
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: PLC: Literature and Space


I've become interested in how to think 'literature' and 'space' together.  I'm aware that there have been some people
trying to conjoin the mathematical field of topology to literature (what I've read is not very inspiring), but I'm
reading an essay by WJT Mitchell, called "Space, Ideology, and Literary Representation" where he writes: "How many times
have we repeated Lessing's protonarrative of the Enlightenment as a dangerous invasion of spatial and pictorial values
into the proper territories of literary temporality?  The fact remains that these values can be inverted, transforming
space in the image of utopian desire, does not alter the dominant sense of space as the Other, the negative realm which
must be colonized under the banner of Time."
	He refers to an almost canonical view here, articulated by Lessing.  Can someone tell me more about this view?  And how
is the Englightenment associated with spatiality?  Philosophically speaking, for Kant (for example), space is the form
of outer intuition, and time the form of inner intuition, and it is the latter that clearly is the more fundamental for
Kant.  So I don't quite see how the Enlightenment is preponderately spatial in orientation.  Indeed, Hegel, a child of
the Englightenment, makes time almost everything.

Ciao,
Reg


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