Setting, Place, and Geography in Texts

Where a text happens is never neutral. Place and geography, the mountains, cities, borders, rooms, and routes a text builds, carry meaning, structure feeling, and often become arguments in their own right. This lesson focuses on the spatial dimension of "Time and Space": how writers and image-makers use location to shape response.

Place as more than location

A setting can operate on several levels at once:

• Literal location: the actual physical space, a coastline, a subway car, a border checkpoint.
• Symbolic space: what the place is made to represent, freedom, entrapment, purity, decay.
• Social space: the human relationships a place organizes, who belongs, who is excluded, who has power there.
• Psychological space: the interior states a place mirrors or provokes, a cramped apartment reflectin