Abstract
The introduction to this volume examines how writing about architectural spaces can be a way of reflecting on intangible processes of the mind, such as memory and imagination. The editors contextualise these ideas in relation to the influential, post-Heideggerian, phenomenological tradition that is most notably exemplified in the work of Gaston Bachelard. They discuss the long reverberations in literature of classical and medieval ideas which link built space with the function and structure of the mind, illustrating these ideas through an extended discussion of the essay by Andrew Lanyon which forms the first chapter of the book. The introduction provides an imaginative and original approach to space and the mind, identifying architecture and cognition as the through line that links the book’s chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
Andrew Lanyon, The Only Non-Slip Dodo Mat in the World (privately published, 2013), p. 16.
- 2.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), pp. 141–60.
- 3.
Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, p. 147.
- 4.
J. H. Prynne, ‘Huts’, Textual Practice, 22 (2008), 613–33 (p. 628).
- 5.
Although Bachelard’s work has recently attracted criticism on the grounds that it is based purely on his own essentially middle class experience (see Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006], pp. 14–15), his work seeks specifically to discover the complex relationship between the personal and the universal.
- 6.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 6.
- 7.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 8, p. xxxvii.
- 8.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John F. Bannan, ‘What Is Phenomenology?’ CrossCurrents (1956), 59–70.
- 9.
David R. Cerbone, ‘Phenomenological Method: Reflection, Introspection, and Skepticism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, ed. by Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 7–25 (p. 7).
- 10.
The Only Non-Slip Dodo Mat in the World and Bifurcated Thought are the third and fourth of a series of privately published books in which Lanyon explores the nature of creativity through imaginative fictions; the two previous volumes are Von Ribbentrop in St Ives (2010) and The Daughters of Radon (2011).
- 11.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 37.
- 12.
Lanyon, Bifurcated Thought, p. 8.
- 13.
Lanyon, Bifurcated Thought, p. 14.
- 14.
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. by H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 10.7.13-14. For this connection, see further Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 125–56.
- 15.
The quotation is from one of the most popular rhetorical treatises, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), III.xvi.29. Cf. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XI.2.1; and Thomas Bradwardine, ‘On Acquiring a Trained Memory’, trans. by Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 361–68.
- 16.
See further Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 37–55.
- 17.
Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 38–39.
- 18.
Jane Griffiths, ‘House Painting’, in Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2008), p. 52.
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Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (2020). Introduction. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_1
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