This chapter offers an interpretative phenomenology of functional neurological disorder (FND) by attempting to get a sense of ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to live with the disorder. Drawing on the author’s own experience as well as first-person accounts from recent qualitative and phenomenologically informed research, the chapter explores the long and difficult journey to get a diagnosis for a neurological disorder that is incompatible with neurological disease and sheds light on how the symptoms of FND can fundamentally alter the meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The chapter focuses specifically on the emotion of shame, exploring how shame is both embodied and intersubjective and the extent to which it can disrupt and modify our experience of space and time. The chapter concludes by introducing the concept of ‘vulnerabilisation’ and how the complex, highly specialised, and bureaucratised structure of the healthcare system can cause iatrogenic harm by delegitimising patient experiences and creating unnecessary obstacles for accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment. The aim is to illuminate the emotional and experiential complexity of the condition, the damaging toll symptoms can take on one’s self-understanding and way of being-in-the-world, and the additional harms the healthcare system can inflict on patients.

This introduction articulates Los Angeles: A Literary History’s interrogation of the literary and cultural representations of Los Angeles using the image of fire that recurs powerfully throughout both the city’s history and its literature. Docherty and López-Calvo acknowledge the mythologized image of LA as a place of ephemerality and reinvention – often perpetuated by the white male authors of the mid twentieth century who have often been centered in the LA canon. Simultaneously, though, they present this book as one that challenges an overfamiliar cultural narrative of LA (and the narrowness of the literary corpus upon which it subsists). The introduction argues that Los Angeles is not merely a site of rupture and creative destruction but also one of complex spatial, temporal, social, and ecological connections. Docherty and López-Calvo frame the volume in its entirety as a call for (and attempt to demonstrate) a broader, deeper, more diverse and more nuanced literary history of Los Angeles that attends to all the city’s complexities and contradictions. The introduction then goes on to offer brief summaries of each chapter in the volume.

This final chapter traces railway infrastructure’s lasting impact on novel form through structural and affective dimensions of the railways in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End. A text poised in a transitional period in transport and literary history, Forster’s novel passes traverses the range of infrastructures examined through this book. This chapter provides a much-needed railway reading of a novel critically framed to date through its representation of motor cars and their attendant geographies. I explore how characters personalise public infrastructure in Howards End by unpacking the parallels Forster establishes between domestic space (the house at Howards End) and railway termini. While hypermobility via the motorcar affords a new kind of freedom of movement, it cannot match the established infrastructure in enabling imaginative mobility. Characters with a social outlook entrenched in railway infrastructure move less but see more than those who prefer the motorcar. This chapter argues that this work’s enigmatic instruction to ‘only connect’ is rooted in infrastructural railway poetics.

It is now widely accepted that our experience of the world is deeply shaped by concepts of space. From territorial borders, to distinctions between public and private space, to the way we dwell in a building or move between rooms, space is central to how we inhabit our environment and make sense of our place within it. Little wonder, then, that space shapes our very language, both in our metaphors (as with “central” and “deeply”) and in what and how we write. Even the movement of the pencil across the page, or the cursor across the screen, is a spatial phenomenon, and one that creative writers and poets have integrated into their work. Literature explores and gives expression to the myriad ways in which space impacts human experience.

This chapter considers the influential argument that there is a formal and substantive complicity between disciplinary surveillance and the novel, specifically the realist novel. Foucauldian readings of literature argue that the nineteenth-century realist novel functioned as a kind of disciplinary power, acting as a complement to the spatial technologies of a disciplinary society. This argument has not been readily acknowledged by the spatial turn in literary studies, but this chapter revisits the disciplinary theme in Dickens’ David Copperfield and compares that novel to Thackeray’s Pendennis. Finding very different treatments of space, surveillance, and the self leads to a reassessment of Foucauldian criticism and the idea that the novel is complicit with disciplinary spatiality. As Bildungsromans, Pendennis and David Copperfield have many similarities, but whereas Dickens plays up the themes of disciplinary introspection and an internalised form of carceral surveillance, Thackeray’s hero remains subject only to a worldly form of discipline, including the business of literature itself. Thackeray moreover suggests that prisons are a microcosm of society rather than that the techniques of the prison extend to a disciplinary spatiality. The chapter concludes that literature exhibits and exemplifies different kinds of spatiality and different versions of the carceral imaginary.

Edited by two Chicana lesbian feminists and formed through commitment to coalitional Third World feminist analysis and practice, This Bridge Called My Back urges us to attend to the conflicts and pleasures that emerge from the radical transformation of the self in relation to others as we struggle for liberation. In the forty years since the anthology’s original publication, we continue to bear witness to the destructive outcomes of neoliberalism and to those who are still consigned to disproportionately bear the brunt of modernity’s violence. We are compelled to address the betrayals of those spaces of solidarity and the use of violence to reclaim difference as an amenity of traditional power. Making domination “make sense” often occurs by recruiting representatives of subordinated populations into normative locations of institutional power. The tokenized investment in women of color as fixed symbols of progressive politics illustrates how even the celebration of racial difference can function as a technology of racist power. I argue that bridge building is also about place making or the radical vision of a space for new social relations and terms of recognition. Radical methodologies for creating art participate in this process of gathering political will to oppose racial power.

This chapter contributes a means of teasing out the uneven spatial ordering of markets. Taking inspiration from Schatzki’s (1991, 2001) practice-based spatial ontology, we introduce a four-part scheme made up of ‘anchors’; ‘places’; ‘settings’; and ‘paths’. We ground the concepts in an empirical account of the Finnish Lapland’s emergence as the official ‘home’ of Santa Claus and the related historical constitution of a Christmas tourism market. With the future of market studies research in mind, we argue that this conceptual framework provides a way of thinking about market making as an inherently spatial process, while also supporting investigations of how markets and the concerns they help produce take shape unevenly over time and across physical space.

This chapter analyzes the colonial period, taking 1536, the date of the founding of the city of Buenos Aires, as a starting point. It aims to discuss texts linked to the conquest of the River Plate – namely, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Comentarios (1555), Ulrich Schmidl’s Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias (1567), and Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s Argentina (1612), among other letters, chronicles, and documents – using water, a key aspect of the spatiality constructed in these works, as a guiding axis for the analysis. This is not aesthetized water, waiting for a contemplative gaze, but water marked by overflow, excessive, water that stagnates, sickens, and stings, overcoming boundaries and impeding the actions of the body attempting to own those lands. In the colonial period, particularly in the texts discussed, a water matrix takes shape which will become the seed of fiction in Argentine literature. The presence of water not as a background or the setting for major events, but as a founding incident of narration, as the main driver of action; a presence which renders spatiality and the bodies traversing it (and enduring it) the keys to the narrative of the River Plate.

Whilst Richard Wagner has long been acknowledged as one of the central figures in the history of orchestration, his treatment of the orchestra has only rarely received scholarly attention. This chapter uses a series of analytical vignettes to examine Wagner’s approach to the orchestra, each addressing a paradox or opposition. The aim is not to expound some grand, overarching narrative, but, instead, to use the friction between competing factors to demonstrate the inherent complexity of Wagner’s approach to the orchestra. The multidimensionality of Wagner’s orchestration is also seen in the highly nuanced interaction of its three main parameters: texture, timbre, and spatiality. The development of Wagner’s orchestration over his lifetime is not presented as a continuous progression; the individuality of each of Wagner’s scores – and even of scenes within those operas – reflects the inseparability of Wagner’s orchestration from its dramatic motivation.

In a review article for the West Australian in 1939, a literary critic known as ‘Norbar’ proclaimed that in the recent past, the ‘most outstanding of Australian novels ... have been novels of city life’. This was a welcome development, Norbar maintained, a sign that Australia had ‘ceased to be a mere colonial appendage to Europe ... and [was] rapidly becoming an expanding industrial nation of the south’. Much of this ‘outstanding’ literature was produced by women (Modjeska; Sheridan). In quick succession, Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw published novels set in contemporary Sydney, capturing the city in a period of rapid development as it attempted to move from colonial chaos to modern rationality. In these novels, women’s position in urban space is unstably located at the nexus of participation and exclusion, reflecting the writers’ status as both insiders (as white settlers) and outsiders (as women) in the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal project of Australian urban modernity. This chapter shows how the architectonics of the novel and topography of the city interacted at a time in Australia when both forms were emerging into modernity.

This chapter explores “constellational form” in Gerald Murnane. It argues that the key continuity in Murnane’s work lies in his associative way of writing, and analyzes the motivations and philosophical convictions underlying this form. It traces these formal continuities across Murnanes work, from his early novel Tamarisk Row (1974) through to his post-hiatus fictions up to Border Districts (2017). It also considers Murnanes “idealism” and probes how this underpins his unique understanding of the ontology of characterological beings and the relationship between implied author and reader.

This chapter on definitions, concepts, and the context of Krautrock exercises different modes of theorising the music. First, the chapter analyses the origins of the term and considers different semantic connotations. Second, the chapter traces the reception of its sounds during and after its heyday (1968 to 1974) and both inside and outside of Germany. Third, the chapter attempts to define musicological characteristics of Krautrock in relation to other musical forms. In the last section, the chapter illustrates how national and transnational identity as well as spatiality can serve as concepts that connect Krautrock’s history, identity formation, and overall politics.

As an anatomist of socially inculcated identities, DeLillo deploys a recurring motif of automobility, which helps to dramatize and often satirize some common white American male inclinations. Propelled by a sense of something missing in their routinely plotted lives, DeLillo’s protagonists often lurch into escape mode in an archetypal white American male way, by jumping in a car and hitting the road. However, their clichéd and encapsulating choice of vehicular transport itself signals how difficult it can be to escape an identity largely formed by negation, that is, by white masculinity’s self-defining exploitation of others. Given the conceptual emptiness that DeLillo finds at the heart of white American male identity, pursuits of a seemingly more genuine self usually result in such protagonists driving themselves right back to where they more or less began.