Alyah Scott Chapter 19: Geography Matters…

1. Alyah ScottChapter 19: Geography Matters… Period 4 9/21/11

2. Geography in literature In the beginning of Geography Matters…, Thomas C. Foster talks about vacations and how whenever we are told that we’re going on vacation, we always ask “Where?”.He says that “every story or poem is a vacation, and every writer has to ask, every time, Where is this one taking place?” (Foster 163-164). The time and place of a story affects the way the characters speak, how they do things and what they do. Foster uses the novel Huckleberry Finn as an example when he tell the readers that the time period, setting, and characters in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are what actually make the story an adventure.

3. Geography in Life Foster also mentions that geography kind of controls what happens in life and the story more than the author does. He uses Napoleon in Russia as an example when he says “Why didn’t Napoleon conquer Russia? Geography. He ran into forces he couldn’t overcome: a ferocious Russian winter and a people whose toughness and tenacity in defending their homeland matched the merciless elements. And that savagery, like the weather, is a product of the place they come from” (Foster 165). He couldn’t control what the weather was doing and the tough people who lived there, and as a result he couldn’t conquer Russia.

4. Literary Geography:Creating a certain mood Foster also tells how geography can create a certain mood. He says how in Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe prepares the reader for the creepy and frightening appeal of the actual house by describing the setting. “He treats us to ‘a singularly dreary tact of country,’ to ‘a few rank sedges,’ and ‘white trunks of decayed trees,’ to ‘the precipitous brink of black and lurid tarn’” before he officially creeps us out with the description of the “’bleak walls’ of the house with its ‘vacant eye-like windows’ and its ‘barely perceptible fissure’” (Foster 166). The way Poe described the setting prepared us by kind of foreshadowing how the house would look. Poe would describe a creepy setting just to tell us about happy, little castle. He created the frightened mood first, then he built off of it making it stronger using geography.

5. Define or develop character Thomas c. Foster also mentions the geography of the story can define or even develop character. Also, the change in a characters natural geography can have an effect on them, they usually end up changing in some way. “In Tony Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead grows up without ever learning who he really is until he leaves his Michigan home and travels back to the family home country in eastern Pennsylvania and Virginia” (Foster 167). He also says that in a way, geography can be character. He uses Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato as an example. In the novel one of the characters say how the American soldiers didn’t know the land and didn’t know what they were up against, and sure enough, he was right. There were tunnels in the land that Foster says made the ‘Tunnels turn the land itself into the enemy” (Foster 168).

6. “Sending Characters South” Foster refers to the author sending the characters somewhere new as “sending them south.” He says that some authors, like D. H. Lawrence, “employ geography as a metaphor for the psyche---when his characters go south, they are really digging deep into their subconscious, delving into that region of darkest fears and desires” (Foster 170). The characters always end up discovering something either about themselves, their feelings or other things. Foster says that the effects can be tragic or comic, but they both follow the same pattern. Once again, the change in the geography changes the character.

7. Types of Places Foster writes about how the different landforms and geographical settings differ and create the story or create a deeper meaning in the story. He says how Theodore Roethke wrote poems about prairies. Prairies are not typically a landscape looked at as poetic, but the reader has to “consider Roethke’s midwesternness as a major element in the making and shaping of his poems” (Foster 172). Foster also talks about how hills and valleys have a logic of their own. With hills there’s up and with valleys there’s down. He asks the reader “Just what do up and down mean?” (Foster 173). He says that low and high have more meaning than we think. “Low: swamps, crowds, fog, darkness, fields, heat, unpleasantness, people , life, death. High: snow, ice, purity, thin air, clear views, isolation, life, death” (Foster 173). One is much less wholesome than the other.

8. Geography in Great Expectations This chapter of HTRLLAP can relate very much to Great Expectations. For example, In great expectations, this chapter mentions that geography can define or develop a character and in Great Expectations, that’s exactly what happened. When Pip went to England, he saw how different his surroundings were. He was immediately affected by geography. “otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think that I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, or ugly”(Dickens 132).

9. Geography in my Life I’m affected by geography everyday because geography is what surrounds us. It’s the weather, setting, time period, landforms, and culture and the way they affects us. I’m affected by geography everyday by the temperature around me. I’m also affected by geography because of the time period we live in. Geography changes us without us even knowing.

10. Works Cited Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Bantam Dell, 1986. Print. Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc., 2003. Print.