Counter-Mapping Modernism: Literature and the Cartographic Imagination

Abstract

This seminar explores the cartographic imagination of modernist literature as it relates to the territorial expansion of the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. It outlines a method of comparative reading that places well-known American authors into dialogue with under-canonised writers from across the contested dominions of US empire.

We begin with Langston Hughes’s construction and destruction of cartographic material, his tearing apart of his world atlas, and his vision of a nation made errant by oceanic flux. From there we will assemble – and collaboratively analyse – a group of poems that make visible the divergent investments modernists made in the production of “counter-maps,” forms of geographic knowledge that challenge the maps made by governments and corporations. 

Bio

Aaron Nyerges is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre. His work focuses on the relationship between literature, media and geography. His first book, American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.