Relational Spaces and Spaces for Relations: A Literary-Geographical Reading of The Brooklyn Follies and Plainsong

Stories have power. They can reveal the ways in which lives and bodies are entangled with the material and social world. They can help convey the lived reality of situations in ways that traditional academic writing cannot. Attending to stories can aid efforts to turn towards a more embedded approach to knowledge generation. Stories hold particular promise for New Area Studies, both as a source to be read for greater and deeper understanding of the globe’s many different worlds at a time of dramatic change, and as a source of new methodologies and theoretical practices to revitalise the field. This article draws on literary geographical theories of space and fiction to offer a new way of appreciating stories. Not as communicators of thought and feeling, but as lively, active and ever-renewing co-actants in the creation and co-creation of space itself. In this framework, reading is not an act of knowledge accumulation, but rather an experiment in which the ontological categories of fact and fiction blur into each other. Texts are not static reflections of a place but can be geographers themselves, actively co-creating spaces in the world. I demonstrate this through a literary-geographical approach to fiction called ‘reading for space’, using two classics of American literature: Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong. Although formally and tonally distinct, both novels create space in similar ways. This reading for space treats two novels not as snapshots of specific places as they once were, but as lively and active co-creators of new spaces.