Literary space in a cartographic frame: Miguel de Cervantes, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Jose Donoso, and Witold Gombrowicz

This dissertation is based on the premise that it is possible to understand some aspects of the experience of literary space through the careful theoretical appropriation of texts that have been written by cartographers and geographers. In its four chapters I explore how cartographic discourse is relevant to Miguel de Cervantes' performance of a territorialized stability in Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Sor Juana's critique of 'perfect' totalizing vision in her Primero sueno (1692), Jose Donoso's exploration of the nature of the limit in El obsceno pajaro de la noche (1970), and Witold Gombrowicz's attempt to fashion a literary world from the impossibly idiosyncratic path narrated in Cosmos (1965).Each chapter utilizes a different set of cartographic materials. The first chapter emphasizes the cartographic and chorographic work of seventeenth-century cartographers such as Anton van den Wyngaerde and Pedro de Esquivel as well as the general principles of modern cartography as expressed by Ptolemy's Geography. The second chapter relies on the work of feminist geographers and scientists such as Gillian Rose and Donna Haraway while also drawing from the tradition of sixteenth-century anatomical illustration. The third chapter utilizes the work of Benoit Mandelbrot and his critics in order to consider the unstable nature of the anthropocentric limit in cartography. The final chapter depends on Torsten Hagerstrand's work on time geography as well as other contemporary attempts to transform individual paths into coherent maps.In each of these chapters, a different fictional 'body' sustains the literary space in question. Where traditional cartography tends to build on the usually unarticulated sensory experiences of its readers by presenting encoded spatial information from a different perspective, in the case of fiction the 'body' that interacts with the 'space' described is not our own. Even though one might want to read fiction as though it were an everyday map, we inevitably find that there is no arrow indicating that 'you are here.' I argue that it is precisely because of this distance between the body of the reader and the `bodies' of the text that these works are able to create such complex experiences of discursive spatiality.