My DIY film/writing school

Writing Experiment LAST CHAPTER

Writing Experiment Chapter 12, Mapping Worlds, Moving Cities

Chapter 12 was quite different from the rest of the book, attempting to draw together all the strands of theory woven throughout into a practical example.

"On the whole, this book has tried not to draw too much of a distinction between form and contents, and has been at pains to point out that there is 'a politics of form'."

This chapter's theme is central to cultural studies: ideas about place and space.

Mapping and moving place - representing it, making it dynamic and changing our conceptions of it.

Key idea: postmodern geography.

A place is never circumscribed, unidirectional or apolitical.

(Fascinating)

"Place" doesn't have a single identity, not contained within physical boundaries. It always links and merges with other places beyond its apparent limits. (Doreen Massey)

"Any place consists of constantly shifting social and economic interrelationships between people and institutions, both within a place and with other places."

With mapping worlds in fiction we can produce "a sense of the relationships between place and people."

Two ways of mapping worlds:

Explicit sense of place -> outright description
Implicit -> described through actions that take place within it

E.g. Explicit:

Waterview waits. It's people come and go while the houses of Waterview sit and wait. There is no bustle here. There are barely any shops, some parks, a school, but mostly Waterview is at the edge of something else: the ocean, Avondale, Point Chevaliser, the motorway, Unitec.

Implicit, is describing action the could only happen in a place like Waterview.

City = site of contradiction and difference

Cities within the city. The social city, the political city, the physical city, etc.

Walk poem - a written journey paralleling a walk through town.

Time-space compression = shifts rapidly between different times and space. A consequence of globalisation, absolutely fundamental to the postmodern world.

WTF?

posted by Simon @ 2:51 pm