Özet:

Virginia Woolf in every 1905 essay titled "Literary Geography" writes: "a writer's country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusion if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar . To insist that [a fictional city] has any counterpart in the cities of the earth is to steal it of half of its charm.” James Joyce, in contrast, in a letter written to Frank Budgen says: "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book." These two positions represent a deep conflict in literary studies. On the one hand, literary objects (here literary cities) are purely imaginative constructions, they are independent from the material reality; on the other, they reflect the material reality so accurately that, it aims to identify with that reality. Here I want to argue that both positions are right and wrong. Woolf's London is as real as Joyce's Dublin and Joyce's Dublin is as fictional as Woolf's London. The cities depicted in literature are real not because they imitate the material cites in an accurate way, but because they re-shape our cognition of those material cities. However, ironically when our recognition of cities are re-shaped by literature, the city represented in a specific work becomes an accurate representation. Thus, reality here appears not as something fixed, but as something that is always re-shaped, and literature is one of the main means of this kinetic process.

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