ABSTRACT
In this chapter I propose a tentative exchange between the research on maps in literature and the object-oriented philosophical stance. By approaching the field of literary cartography from a specific interest in the objecthood of maps, I will take into consideration cartographic ekphrases as literary devices that offer aesthetic accounts of maps, particularly in the case of verbal descriptions of maps-in-themselves, i.e. without consideration of the map-territory relation. Apart from the ekphrastic device, I contend that literature helps us in indirectly grasping the resistance as well as the reserves of cartographic objects. I provide a theoretical background for this argument by offering a review of the current relationship between literary studies and object-oriented thinking. Subsequently, I will employ a case study of The Road by Cormac McCarthy to treat the map appearing in this novel by following an object-oriented attitude, finally suggesting how literary worlds may provide oblique points of access to the life of maps. The literary broken map emerging in the dystopian landscape of The Road alludes to the inscrutable reality and unpredictable surprises of that particular cartographic object.
