The Work in the World: Geographical Practice and the Written Word

254 Pages·1996·12.574 MB·English

by  Michael R. Curry

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THE WORK IN THE WORLD
Geographical Practice and
the Written Word
<^>>
MICHAEL R. CURRY
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Minneapolis / London
Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Curry, Michael R.
The work in the world: geographical practice and the written word /
Michael R. Curry.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. - ) and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2664-2 (acid-free paper)
ISBN 0-8166-2665-0 (pbk.: acid-free paper)
1. Geography—Authorship. 2. Written communication. I. Title.
G70.C87 1996
808'.06691—dc20
96-16478
The University of Minnesota is an
equal-opportunity educator and employer.
For Joanna
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xm
Introduction i
Part I. The Traditional Common Sense:
The Universal Text in a Universal System
1. Formalizing Common Sense (I): The Text as Representation 17
2. Formalizing Common Sense (II): The Work in the System 43
Part II. Beyond the Traditional Common Sense:
The Author, the Work, and the World Beyond
3. Formulating the New Common Sense 61
4. Beyond the New Common Sense:
Toward a Geography of the Work in the World 85
Part III. The Work in the World
5. Authorship and the Construction of Authority 119
6. The Work in the World 143
7. Finding the Space in the Text and the Text in Space 175
Conclusion: Learning from the Place of the Work in the World 201
Notes 211
Index 233
VII
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Preface
Like much else, academic life is filled with paradox, and anyone who has
spent time in a university has seen it. There is the expert in technology
who cannot program his VCR. There is the expert in exotic cultures who is
incapable of making any headway in developing an understanding of her
home department. There is the expert in ethics who bullies everyone in
sight. And on and on; the reader can fill in other examples from his or her
own experience.
My subject here is the nature of the written work in geography, and it,
too, is paradoxical, although this fact is not often noted. Granted, one does
find in academics a vague feeling of paradox in everyday discourse about
the written work. There the aspiring academic learns early about the poli-
tics of publishing, about the regular interjection of political, subdiscipli-
nary, and personal power into the process; at the same time, the student is
taught to treat the written work with a kind of reverence, based on its abil-
ity to represent the world so clearly and transparently. And with a little
nudging the average geographer might see an added paradox or two in the
treatment of the geographical work. For one, since the 1980s we have seen
a stream of works on this as text and that as text, on landscape or nature or
city as text, but we have seen almost no works on "text as text." Further,
while geographers have been hard at it, studying the geography of almost
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