Name: Maps of the imagination
ISBN: 9781595340054

Peter Turchi

the writer as cartographer

Maps of the imagination

In Maps of the Imagination, Peter Turchi posits the idea that maps help people understand where they are in the world in the same way that literature, whether realistic or experimental, attempts to explain human realities. The author explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work, making crucial decisions about what to include and what to leave out, in order to get from here to there, without excess baggage or a confusing surplus of information. Turchi traces the history of maps, from their initial decorative and religious purposes to their later instructional applications. He describes how maps rely on projections in order to portray a three-dimensional world on the two-dimensional flat surface of paper, which he then relates to what writers do in projecting a literary work from the imagination onto the page.

The Writer as Cartographer

Maps of the Imagination

Martin Feld

Turchi offers a truly unique view of how and why we communicate, using maps as a metaphor (and even literal guide) to show the ways that we write and view the world. It’s all about sense-making.

This is perhaps my favourite quote of the book, found in chapter two (‘A Wide Landscape of Snows’): ‘Our sense of place is in many ways more important than objective fact. The impressions we carry of the house we grew up in and the place where we played as children are more important to us than any mathematical measurements of them’.

For me, qualitative experience (or narrative) always beats numbers.

Alexander Lobov

Alex Jones

Drawing on texts as varied as poetry, novels, and cartoons, Turchi explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work. Tracing the history of maps, he then relates what writers do in projecting a literary work from the imagination onto the page.

Maps of the imagination the writer as cartographer

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