from Part III - Applications and Extensions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
In this chapter, Eve Sorum asks what happens when a reader or writer tries to orient herself toward an othered body or distant place in a text, only to have the object of that gaze turn and look back. What can disorienting literary moves – changes to both poetic and narrative form and perspective – reveal about how space determines who can speak and how one can speak in a text? This chapter explores the disorientation and subsequent transformation of literary spaces – the spaces of the page and the physical geographies explored within the texts – in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon (1931) and Mina Loy’s poem “Parturition” (1914). In both works, the “objects” of orientation seize control of not only the narrative gaze, but also the space and form of the text itself. Such reorientation transforms the geographic and spatial power dynamics in the texts: Africa turns toward and speaks to the United States, while the laboring female body transcends domestic space and achieves a cosmic view of men. These acts of disorientation and reorientation demand reexamining the spaces from which we read and write, as well as the literary space of the page itself.
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