Spatial Imaginations and Counter-Geographies of Oregon and the Far West.

Abstract

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the integration of the Oregon Country into the framework of the United States presented a profound challenge for American writers and policymakers. This paper proposes that the nation’s expansion into the Pacific Northwest and Asia-Pacific hemisphere was undermined by spatial practices, ideas, and imaginations that located Oregon within counter–geographies and resisted the homogenizing assumptions of American exceptionalism. The paper examines literary themes that address these outcomes by looking at popular works by Washington Irving and Francis Parkman, contrasting them with divergent views found in previously unstudied travel journals and memoirs of contemporary immigrants and travelers.

Biographical Note

Steffen Wöll (SFB 1199, Leipzig University Germany)
Employed at SFB 1199 since October 2016, Steffen has contributed his American Studies background to a sub-project, finishing with a dissertation titled “The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse.” Starting in 2020, he is employed as a postdoctoral researcher in the follow-up project that involves the study of US transoceanic expansion between 1880-1940 and its representation and construction in literature and other cultural texts. These studies bring to the fore discursive dynamics and intersections between spatial imaginations of the transpacific and circum-caribbean spaces, as well as their connections at geo-strategic junctions such as the Panama Canal. Next to the analysis of spatial imaginations, formats, and orders, he is interested in representations of agency, race, and otherness in US literature and culture. Articles about these and other subjects have appeared in several journals and volumes.