Anti-geography
Appelbaum, Robert
Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2/ Special Issue 3 (September, 1998)
Abstract
An appreciation of the dialectic of practice and belief is especially important to the study of that subsidiary field of the culture of geography which I will call “anti-geography.” By anti-geography I am referring to a system of imaginary geography, a geography beyond geography, as it were–a system of fantasy with roots in classical antiquity that had a long development in early modern Europe and that continues to be observed even today, albeit in a highly modified form. In anti-geographical fantasy the imagination takes phenomena that lie outside the limits of the known sociophysical universe as its objects, phenomena that occupy what today we might call “the beyond.” Sometimes serious and quasi-scientific, sometimes merely playful or comic, and often a combination of the two, a specimen of jocoserious discourse, anti-geography fills up the spaces of the beyond as if they were similar to or continuous with the known; it imagines the world beyond us as if it were really contiguous with the world at hand, and as if contiguity guaranteed some form of continuity.
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