American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination

American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination is a new reading of American modernism that examines the cartographic literature of the United States and places it in context of the state's overseas expansion. Dr Nyerges stretches the map of US literature across an imperial archipelago of territories and outlines a method of comparative reading that brings canonical American authors into dialogue with under-represented writers from across the contested dominions of US empire. He argues that literary artists from across US dominion responded to space-dominating technologies of empire and retooled them to imagine counter-cartographies, designs that challenged the official geographies of the United States.

Join Dr Nyerges for a special seminar at the RAI that 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. 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. 

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.