Place and Psychogeography in Henry James’s The Ambassadors

Souad Baghli Berbar

Abstract


Following the recent spatial turn in literary criticism and the shift of focus on place, the present paper examines the special significance of place in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors (1903) and explores the relationship between geography and psychology through the main character, Lambert Strether. Analysing the latter’s outer and inner observations draws on a close reading of the novel and the instrumentation of such theories as psychogeography and psychoanalytical criticism. Strether’s trip is an introspective voyage as much as an exploratory expedition, allowing insight into his subconsciousness through the tropes of the places he traverses. His mental visions of spaces in the novel can be surmised in terms of a psychogeography of his movements, a sort of landscape of the mind which is a reflection of the Freudian perception of the human psyche.


Keywords


place; psychogeography; mindscape; Henry James; The Ambassadors

Full Text:

PDF

References


Bachelard, Gaston. (1958, 1994). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.

Blanchot, Maurice. (1982). The Space of Literature. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Bray, Julia. (2009). Starting Out in New Worlds: Under Whose Empire? High Tradition and Subaltern Tradition in Ottoman Syria, 16th and 19th/20th centuries. Annali di Ca’ Foscari XLVIII, 3 Série orientale, 40, pp. 199–220.

Cameron, Sharon. (1991). Thinking in Henry James. Chicago, London: Chicago University Press.

Chambrier-Slama, Josiane. (2013). L’aventure négative: Une lecture psychanalytique d’Henry James. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 94(1), pp. 179–186. DOI: https://10.1111/j.1745-8315.2011.00527.x.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1817, 1983). Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Coverly, Merlin. (2010). Psychogeography. Harpenden, UK: Oldcastle Books.

Debord, Guy-Ernest. (2006). Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. In: Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology (pp. 8–11). San Francisco: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Debord, Guy-Ernest, Jorn, Asger. (1957). Guide Psychogéographique de Paris. Paris: Gallimard.

Dreifus, Erika. (2004). A Focus on the Surrounding Scene: Examining Paris in The Ambassadors. The Henry James Review, 25(1), pp. 44–51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2004.0003.

Freud, Sigmund. (1933, 1957). New Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth.

Hocks, Richard A. (1989). The James Family: Psychoanalysis and Fiction. The Henry James Review, 10(2), pp. 77–81. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2010.0393.

Hu, Jane. (2016). Stream of Consciousness. In: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org.10.4324/9781135000356-REM1103-1

James, Henry. (1903, 1909). The Ambassadors. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son.

Luhmann, Niklas. (2000). Art as a Social System. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

McGurl, Mark. (1999). Social Geometries: Taking Place in Henry James. Representations, 68, pp. 59–83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2902955.

Moretti, Franco. (1998). Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London and New York: Verso.

Pearsall, Judith. (ed.). (2002). Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Tenth Edition. Oxford: OUP.

Prieto, Eric. (2011). Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy and Beyond. In: Robert T. Tally Jr. (ed.), Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (pp. 13–28). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337930_2.

Rivkin, Julie. (2007). The Genius of the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Criticism. In: Peter Rawlings (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies (pp. 59–79). London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288881_4.

Rowe, John Carlos. (1984). After Freud: Henry James and Psychoanalysis. The Henry James Review, 5(3), pp. 226–232. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2010.0302.

Self, Will. (2007). Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place. New York: Bloomsbury.

Tally, Robert T. Jr. (2021). Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination. New York: Routledge.

Watts, Cedric. (1960). The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication. Essays in Criticism. X(3), pp. 250–274. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/X.3.250.

Westphal, Bertrand. (2011). Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119161.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/ff.2023.41.2.77-87
Date of publication: 2023-12-19 14:19:55
Date of submission: 2023-03-01 22:26:52


Statistics


Total abstract view - 518
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 220

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2023 Souad Baghli Berbar

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.