Despite the existence of research conducted by geographers eschewing or professing religious faith, the influence of researchers and their methods have yet to receive critical attention within the study of religion. The experience of three geographers working on a three-year research project suggests that it is vital to reflect upon the inter-subjective relationships and methodologies used to reconstruct the religious past. How do different subject positions influence our selections from historical records? We also consider whether the spatialities of putatively ‘religious’ archives, whether formally or informally constituted, make a difference to the construction of historiographical knowledge. In attempting to answer these questions, the paper argues that developing an awareness of different types of positionality, vis-a-vis religious faith and practice, combined with reflexivity, vis-a-vis methodology, can enrich the interpretative reconstruction of the religious past.

https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2008.00334.x

Three geographers in an archive: positions, predilections and passing comment on transient lives

With an assertion by Foucault the master of genealogy and historical location that \"the present epoch will be above all else the epoch of space\" (1986: 22) it may appear that growth in spatial studies has been exponential and has infiltrated all theoretical approaches. Yet such a development of the spatial as a factor for critical consideration must not be taken for granted. For while Kant may have privileged space in his Transcendental Aesthetic (1787) by discussing it in equal measure with time, and Gotthold Lessing (1766) may have explored the idea of a \"poetic picture\" (1962: 74) and the relationship between the arts, time, and space (77-91) as early as 1766, the period between Kant's work and the mid twentieth-century can be seen as one in which space has frequently been subsumed by the importance of time and its correlative: a linear, narrative chronology that \"sees space as merely the particularity which specifies and fragments history\" (Grossberg 179). In the social sciences, space in this period had been overshadowed by the importance of time, geography overshadowed by history: \"putting phenomena in a temporal sequence . . . somehow came to be seen as more significant and critically revealing than putting them beside or next to each other in a spatial configuration\" (Soja 1996: 168). Thus Foucault asks the question: \"Did it start with Bergson or before? Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic\" (1980: 70). Therefore, what there has been in relation to the spatial may be deemed a resurgence; a resurgence wider than in Foucault's view: a

Writing the Post-Colonial Space: Ben Okri's Magical City and the Subversion of Imperialism

This thesis examines the representations of the self as a cultural agent, both reacting to and actively shaping codes of social and artistic respectability, as displayed in the diaries of the canonical Victorian writers Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It analyses the impact of wider ideological and social imperatives on the diarists’ subjective experience and reads their tendency to silence the self as a symptom of the cultural pressure to merge their private and public persona. These diaries represented a forum in which the diarists perpetually negotiated their own value within the Victorian ideology of productivity and thus not only reflect their inner world but also the cultural climate of the nineteenth century. 
Chapter One traces the selected diarists’ reluctance to reveal private information, as well as their tendency to foreground professional productivity, to the social pressure to efface emotions relating to the self and to only cultivate those that nurtured the community. It identifies the similarities between the compulsive self-discipline advocated in the psychological discourse of the period, particularly Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859), and the willingness to both live up to and actively shape the cultural codes of respectability that Elizabeth Eastlake and Henry Crabb Robinson display in their diaries. Chapter Two compares and contrasts the desire for maximal professional productivity as exhibited in George Eliot’s and George Gissing’s diaries. Both worked obstinately in order to increase their own value: whereas Eliot sought to redeem her ‘guilt of the privileged,’ Gissing desperately needed to increase his financial solvency through literary output. Chapter Three discusses the ways in which John Ruskin’s diary helped him block out unrespectable and painful private experiences through transforming his obsessive desire to appropriate and “feel” visual experience into a professional task. Chapter Four shows that Gerard Manley Hopkins—because he was acutely concerned by his cultural otherness caused by his homosexuality—not only sought refuge and validation by joining the Jesuits, but by narrowing his realm of experience to nature, merged the private and the public self into the figure of the professional, asexual, dutiful and disinterested observer.

/pdf/preaching-silence-the-disciplined-self-in-the-victorian-1ya1hqlz5m.pdf

Preaching silence: the disciplined self in the Victorian diary

The fragility of the notion of identity can be seen in the fact that it is never simply enough to be what one is, rather one must become what one is in order to give shape to that identity, or make it function effectively in political contexts. Yet this is to open up a dangerous gap between identity and identification, for identification in its emphasis on becoming what one is now has the capacity to change the content of identity into virtually anything. —Richard F. Calichman

Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2002-2003

This essay analyzes how Newman's Apologia seeks to articulate nineteenth-century conceptions of time through a canonical conception of prophetism, and how the question of private space is made into a national issue through Newman's narrative. The paper finally argues that Newman's technique of "replacement" deconstructs itself as a metaphorical process, which makes for the unique literariness of the Apologia.

Replacing the Self in Cardinal Newman's Apologia

The border between fiction and truth in autobiography has been the subject of numerous investigations, yet the question of the spatial positioning of the author remains largely ignored. Critics have written abundantly about autobiography in its relation to the origin of the author as a living personality with his/her own story but have never seriously treated the idea of the spatial modalities, the layout, of the author's writing self. In his relatively unknown 1967 article \"Of Other Places,\" Michel Foucault, then on assignment in Tunis, predicted that Western thought would soon become an arena for two competing visions of the world: \"One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space\" (1986: 22). If we acknowledge, with Foucault, that space itself has a history (22), we may also deduce that the history of the \"functions\" of the autobiographical author, logically called upon to situate himself or herself in pragmatic fashion not just as a body interacting with other bodies but also simply in the act of pronouncing \"I\" when faced with a \"you\" is manifested as multiple effects of geographical schÃ©mas. What Foucault was soon to call the \"author-function\" (la fonctionauteur), i.e., the various conceptual definitions of authority produced by historically dated discursive conjunctions (Foucault 1969: 810-11), cannot escape the law of geographical placement implicated in the use of any specific discourse. The purpose of this paper is to survey theoretical tools for the study of this aspect of the author-function, and to apply some of them to Cardinal Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) by way of illustration. My approach, to state it clearly from the outset, is deeply influenced by pragmatism, at least as represented by Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1999). Our positions, however, differ on two fundamental points: where Lecercle sees, in the \"placement\" that produces a \"subject,\" the effect of a purely linguistic interrogation (34), I refuse to exclude from my reflections a kind of emplacement

Topologies of the Self: Space and Life-Writing

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Topologies of the Self: Space and Life-Writing