Psychogeography: In recent years this term has been used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas from ley lines and the occult, to urban walking and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? This book examines the origins of psychogeography in the Paris of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and its political application in the work of Guy Debord and the Situationists. Psychogeography continues to find retrospective validation in much earlier traditions, from the visionary writing of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey to the rise of the flâneur and the avant-garde experimentation of the Surrealists. These precursors to psychogeography are discussed here alongside their modern counterparts, for today these ideas hold greater currency than ever through the popularity of writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Patrick Keiller.
From the urban wanderer to the armchair traveller, psychogeography provides us with new ways of experiencing our environment, transforming the familiar streets of our everyday experience into something new and unexpected. Merlin Coverley conducts the reader through this process, providing an explanation of the terms involved and an analysis of the key figures and their works.
I am in the process of preparing for my transfer exam next month which requires a report, a body of practice, a presentation and as a PGR candidate I undergo a viva. Here is the synopsis of my research as it stands presently:
The purpose of the PhD research is to explore and critically evaluate the contemporary relevance of chorography as a practice research method for the critical examination of place. The research aims to situate chorography as a significant and relatively under-acknowledged approach in visual art to map characteristics of the locale by examining the relations between the physical site, its numerous interpretations, and representations. It seeks to investigate the performative and embodied experience of chorographic practice as a potential original contribution to knowledge. Additionally, the research aims to develop new ways to examine artistic practices of place-making and its application in visual art by restoring, developing, and communicating a connection between chorography, past and present. Overall, the purpose of the PhD research is to contribute to the understanding and application of chorography in contemporary artistic practice and research, specifically focusing on its application to the site of Brontë country.
“This book celebrates some of the most dazzling treasures of English literature to show how Britain’s greatest authors have been inspired by, and even redefined, their country. From Chaucer’s pilgrims journeying from Southwark to Canterbury, to the 21st century suburban hinterlands of J.G. Ballard, this book will explore how the places and landscapes of Britain permeate the nation’s great literary works and how these works have, in turn, helped shape our perception and understanding of landscape and place, both real and imagined. As well as celebrating the traditional British landscape the book will also examine the literary construction of the city, following the mysterious fog-filled streets that stretch from the London of Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to the urban underworlds revealed by contemporary writers such as Neil Gaiman and Iain Sinclair. Accompanying a major exhibition at the British Library, the book also features such diverse landscapes as Emily Bronte’s wild and windy Yorkshire Moors, Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial northern towns, the seaside-turned-nightmare of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Graham Greene’s seedy and menacing Brighton, Virginia Woolf’s Bond Street and Hanif Kureishi’s suburbia, this book will describe and illustrate the work of over 100 of the greatest British writers who have been inspired by place, spanning the Middle Ages to the 21st century.”
The purpose of this article is a comparative analysis of Drayton’s poems Ideas Mirrour and Poly-Olbion tracing echoes of the former in his latter richly chorographical work. For the purpose of this analysis the main focus is on Poly-Olbion as a prime exemplar of a chorographic work and I also aim to draw out strands that specifically follow the concept of the body as it pertains to one of my research questions: If a sensory physical mapping of place occurs prior to representation where is the body in the process of chorography and how do we address the political implications of the embodied in the act of representation? It appears this question is complex as bodies often appear symbolically in rich and intricate intertextual and iconotextual relationships. The body it seems emerges as a chimera hiding in plain sight like Poe’s purloined letter.A chorographic text such as Poly-Olbion offers tangible clues as to how this problematic might be addressed through practice.
POLY-OLBION (1612-1622):
Poly-Olbion is an expansive poetic journey through the landscape, history, traditions and customs of early modern England and Wales. Originally published in two parts (1612, 1622), it is also a richly collaborative work: Michael Drayton’s 15,000-line poem navigates the nation county by county and is embellished by William Hole’s thirty engraved county maps. It is accompanied for its first eighteen ‘songs’ by John Selden’s prose illustrations. Drayton was a contemporary of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and Poly-Olbion crystallizes early modern ideas of nationalism, history and memory.
Drayton’s Early Sonnets, Poly-Olbion and Chorography:
Reyes outlines how Drayton’s epic Poly-Olbion was influenced and connected to his earlier sonnets particularly Ideas Mirrour (1594) later published as Idea (1599-1631) which both reflect and explore his interest in the history and topography of his country and celebrate ‘the discovery of England.’ p.1002The central trope in the allegorical Idea is fluvial and Drayton draws on ‘chorographic techniques to represent the beloved.’ p.1003 The central figure Idea, as an ideal representation of woman contained within the ideal geography of the English landscape, is embedded in the River Anker which runs through Drayton’s home county of Warwickshire and later appears in Poly-Olbion ‘where the poet finds the woman that he had originally praised under the poetic name of Idea.’p.1014
In Poly-Olbion Reyes identifies close connections to distant genres including sonnet, sequence, perspective, pastoral, epic, the heroic, lyrical and topographical as Poly-Olbion comes to represent the ‘eroticisation of the landscape’. whilst simultaneously trying to reify Drayton’s English identity. p.1003 Developments at the time facilitated this vision in the ‘revival of geographical writings and advancements in cartography’ and the renaissance of chorographic works in the 16th-17th Centuries, the most notable exemplar of the genre being William Camden’s Brittania (1586) pp.1003-4. Other proponents of the descriptive and primarily textual approach to history and travel narrative included the antiquarian works of John Leland’s Itinerary (1549) and William Lambarde’s A perambulation of Kent (1576). The rise of the ‘body politic’ and the ‘vision of the allegorical body’ supported ‘a spatial construction of national identity.’ p.1004 The rediscovery of Strabo and Ptolemy presupposed the encyclopedist approach to the genre but one whose methodologies ‘favoured a qualitative and localist point of view with a pictorial quality.’ P.1004
Reyes states that ‘Drayton’s interest in topography and the human body was driven by the Golden age of cosmography and cartography in England […] and reflected the idea of a human being as a microcosmos.’p..1006 According to D K Smith (XXXX no date given) in the 16th-17th Centuries this ‘resulted in a new cartographical epistemology and a cartographic imagination that provided English authors with a new set of metaphors and rhetorical tropes related to space and it’s embodiment.’ P.1006 Reyes states ‘the conception of the body as space determined the aesthetics of Poly-Olbion’. She cites Traub (XXXX no date given) ‘the description of human figures became a common aesthetic in Renaissance cartographies – ‘maps began to imply that bodies may be a terrain to be charted and is responsible for the chorographic function of human figures.’ P.1006 The ‘representation of the human body came to be seen as a ‘conglomerate of delimited spaces’. P1006 According to Reyes this explains the ‘anthropomorphizing representations of rivers, hills, mountains and forests’ in the maps of Poly-Olbion and that this representation of space is commensurate with a topographical representation of the body. P.1006 Between Ideas Mirrour and Poly-Olbion there is a ‘reciprocal movement from the topographical representation of the human body and the personification of the landscape’. P.1006. This personification of the landscape is represented in the above engraving, the frontispiece to Poly-Olbion which Helgerson (XXXX no date given) states is ‘a goddess like woman dressed in a map’ holding the horn of plenty, which symbolizes prosperity, and who stands as ‘a living embodiment of nature.’ P.1010
denisestartin.co.uk 