How to Do Narratives With Maps

In “How to Do Narratives With Maps: Cartography as a Performative Act in Gulliver’s Travels and Through the Looking Glass,” Emmanuelle Peraldo and Yann Calbérac interrogate the distinction between literary narratives and maps in order to question the specificities of both languages that the text embeds: that is, words and maps. To that end, they focus on two major masterpieces of British literature, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. These imaginary maps enable readers to locate the plots in a discernible spatial framework, but Peraldo and Calbérac argue that rather than merely anchoring the narratives in a given place, the maps have a performative function. Instead of stabilizing the characters and plots on in a homogenous graphic space, the maps trigger the action and redefine its place, in effect performing the functions commonly associated with narrative itself.