Description in space: Geography and narrative form

Abstract

Abstract Description and experience of the form of landscape are the core of geographical methodology and are explicitly theorized in humanist geography, particularly by Edward Relph. This essay outlines how his ideas about “seeing, thinking, and describing” – particularly the primacy of description – are relevant to a reformation for how narratologists handle the relationship between fiction and environment. Though the narratologist deals with reading and analyzing descriptions rather than producing descriptions as the geographer does, the phenomenological relationship between self, environment, and description of the latter can curiously expand what we normally think of as the reader-text dyad in the former. This new perspective is put into practice by studying three examples from American novels that offer descriptions of the environment from above.