Corpography

In discussing the modern experience of battle, Derek Gregory has developed the neologistic concept of ‘corpography,’ explaining that ‘the radically different knowledges that the war-weary soldiers improvised as a matter of sheer survival [constitute] a corpography: a way of apprehending the battle space through the body as an acutely physical field in which the senses of sound, smell and touch were increasingly privileged in the construction of a profoundly haptic or somatic geography.’

What he calls ‘corpography’ implies a constant re-mapping of landscape through the soldier’s body.

Their improvisational knowledges were intensely corporeal and constituted a ‘corpography’ whose constructions relied primarily on sound, smell and touch.

Space in the Francophone literature of the 20th century acts as an active player in the narratives here studied. This is where my use of the concept of “corpography” provides a new methodology to study representations of space within novels as it is conceived, perceived, and lived by characters in retracing their movements.