YINING—Scholars discussed the influence of economic globalization on literary geography at a recent seminar in Xinjiang organized by the Literary Geography Society of China.

Economic globalization has had a great impact on the culture of various countries and regions and in the field of literary studies as well. Zeng Daxing, president of the Literary Geography Society of China and a professor at Guangzhou University, said that economic globalization provides a new perspective for literary geography. Under its infl uence, new social space has emerged, but social space is subordinate to natural space whether it be old or new. Each writer carries the geographical genes formed in the natural and human environment he or she is familiar with. No matter in what kind of social space he or she writes, this geographical gene will influence his or her works. In the context of economic globalization, the influence of geography in many works has increased rather than decreased.

The geographical nature of literary works will exist for a long time, and so will the interaction between literature and geographical environment. However, the regional nature of literature in the context of economic globalization is still different from its regional nature in traditional society. The main reason is not the change of the natural environment, but the change of the writers’ vision and the readers’ needs. Therefore, literary geography must confront the emergence of new social space to discover new problems and offer answers, Zeng said.

The emergence of new social space poses greater challenges to the study of literary diffusion. Gao Jianxin, a professor at the School of Literature and Journalism and Communication at Inner Mongolia University, said that barriers to the spread of literature posed by natural environments have been reduced as increasingly developed communication technologies allow information to be transmitted all over the world in an instant in the era of economic globalization. This makes the diffusion of literature lose its focus, leaving no clear distinction between the center and the periphery. It also raises new questions for the study of literary diffusion in literary geography.

In recent years, research in literary geography has achieved a lot, especially in the deep understanding, analysis and application of the literary landscape.

“After several generations of efforts, research on classical Chinese frontier poetry has seen great accomplishments. To go further, it is necessary to learn from the theory and methods of literary geography to strengthen the investigation and research of the literary landscape,” Gao said.

Distributed in a certain geographical environment, a literary landscape is formed after a writer writes about it, and in most cases it is real. The study of literary landscape should value both literary texts and field investigations to avoid the deficiencies of traditional literary studies that focused only on literary texts. For example, when studying the literary landscapes extensively described in the frontier poems of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the conclusions obtained often cannot withstand scrutiny if the researcher has failed to conduct detailed field visits with reference to certain geographical space, Gao said.

Literary works cannot simply be seen as descriptions of certain regions and places. In many cases, literary works help shape these places. In this sense, literature is not merely a flat mirror of regional life. It can be a prism or even a beauty shot, said Liu Chuane, a professor from the School of Language and Literature at Hubei University

(Edited and translated by Jiang Hong )