FAQ
WHAT IS THIS SITE FOR?
This site is a time capsule in order to archive the work of undergraduate students at Loyola University Chicago. Specifically, the site serves as an electronic scrapbook for a Spring 2021 English class focusing on American literature to 1865. Please note that the blog consists of digitized versions of collaborative essays, so please see the text for the correct authors. The site author is noted as myself, so I want to clarify that these essays are the work of many students.
WHO TEACHES THE CLASS IN QUESTION?
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ENGL 375, Illocality: Deep Mapping The (North) American Land-Mind-Scape, is taught by Dr. Marta L. Werner. She is a professor of English, and specializes in American literature and culture, textual and digital humanities, as well as poetry, (especially Dickinson). Please visit her profile at Loyola if you are interested in her work:
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https://www.luc.edu/english/people/faculty/directory/martalwerner/
WHAT IS MAPPING?
Mapping is a multi-layered approach to capturing complex realities. These realities are not limited to imaginative geographies, keys, writing, and narratives, but these aspects can be surveyed through cartography. Deep mapping is intertextual, multi-disciplinary, and fragmentary--A deep map is self-aware and self-reflective of its boundaries, and relational to networks in local and global topography. This site encompasses a few fractals of what maps can manifest out of literary study. It is my hope that the diversity of maps reflected in this archive underlays the possibilities for mapping as a network of critical examination.
HOW DOES MAPPING CHANGE OUR VIEW OF LITERATURE?
A narrative space is when a character crosses ontologically-laden landscapes at thresholds, or periods of suspension. Re-imagining narratives as spatial entities acknowledges symbolic markers and geography in map-making and boundary-drawing. Far from neutral, cartography is entrenched in power relations. Mapping enables a critical approach to text that provides insight on its spatial embodiment. To me, mapping Thoreau re-imagines his texts as multi-layered geographies, in which each layer is unwound and redefined in a collaborative process.