The Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship invites you attend a seminar titled “Beyond the 98th Meridian: Deep Mapping the America West in the works of Larry McMurtry, Charles Bukowski & Walter Mosley” by Professor Charles Travis.

This talk presents the inauguration of a Spatial Humanities monograph project for Indiana University Press which will map Lonesome Dove (1985) a counter-Western by Texas writer Larry McMurtry, in conjunction with depictions of Los Angeles in Skid Row Poet's Charles Bukowski's verse, and the crime-fiction prose of African-American novelist Walter Mosley. The presentation will illustrate digital mappings of their works created in geographical information systems (GIS) software, guided by the critical literary analysis techniques of M.M. Bakhtin, Julie Kristeva and Franco Moretti. By utilizing GIS in such a manner, the spatial and temporal intersections of these writers, their works, and their separate but textually interweaving life paths can be plotted in juxtaposition with other novels, scripts, films, pieces of visual art, and archival, cartographical and historical documents and events emerging from the landscapes of the "American West." The aim of this type of 'deep mapping' is to more critically extirpate, examine and interrogate inventions of the “West,” and its progress as it unfurled to the shores of the Pacific coast in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the early decades of the twenty-first century.

Professor Charles Travis works in the area of Geography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with the Department of History at the University of Texas, Arlington. He is currently conducting research in literary, historical, cultural and human geography, the digital and environmental humanities and the development of digital humanities and geographical information systems methodologies and applications.

Date: Thursday, 31 May 2018
Time: 15:00-16:00
Venue: Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, Old College House,
Seminar Room 1-09, University of Pretoria, Hatfield Campus

RSVP Ms Cecelia Samson
[email protected]
012 420 2653