Karen Brennan: Place as (Psychic) Space (January 2003)

Karen Brennan explores the importance of place in fiction, arguing that it is critical to the birth of characters and ideas, and not just a kind of backdrop. Brennan also discusses how place is not a replica of the actual but is constituted through an interaction between the imagined world of the text and the reader’s world. Using Faulkner to exemplify this, she then explores the dis-placement of modern writers, and the different forms that place, as a result, can take in writing by Gass, Faulkner, Salter, and Woolf.