Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference

by Nedra Reynolds

Twenty-first-century technological innovations have revolutionized the way we experience space, causing an increased sense of fragmentation, danger, and placelessness. In Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference, Nedra Reynolds addresses these problems in the context of higher education, arguing that theories of writing and rhetoric must engage the metaphorical implications of place without ignoring materiality.

 

This text marks a summit of work initiated in Reynolds’s well-received article, “Composition’s Imagined Geographies: The Politics in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace.” In continuing this earlier work, Geographies of Writing multiplies its range of application and proposes a geographical rhetoric. Reynolds uses cultural geography, feminist theory, qualitative research, and service learning to link writing and spatial practices and to unpack the layers of the social production of space. Drawing largely from participant-observation research in a cultural geography class at Leeds University in England, she investigates questions of difference and identity and offers an alternative to the process paradigm.

 

Geographies of Writing makes three closely related contributions: one theoretical, to re-imagine composing as spatial, material, and visual; one political, to understand the sociospatial construction of difference; and one pedagogical, to teach writing as a set of spatial practices. Aided by seven maps and illustrations that reinforce the book’s visual rhetoric, Geographies of Writing shows how composing tasks and electronic space function as conduits for navigating reality.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[matthew harding · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is not at all what I had expected, which is not to say that it's a bad book, it's just not as focused on writing as it is on the discipline of geography--cultural/human--which probably led me to rate it lower than it should be rated. I had assumed a closer connection to the Rhet/Comp field, but mostly (in the later half of the book)Reynolds discusses qualitative projects undertaken by her students and the difficulties that were encountered with existing student biases--the biases are also illustrated in some of the questions asked by professors to which students were supposed to respond. I've still got one more chapter to finish, and although I can't see myself applying this book to my own classes in straight-forward fashion, I do see that it would be applicable when it comes to discussing place with my students. Her section that discusses service learning and community service programs in colleges was somewhat insightful for the negatives it explores, but then, I already knew (as do many working in this area) about those negatives.

[Linda Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for those teaching writing from an interdisciplinary or place-based approach.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far I'm liking this.