corpography

English

Etymology

From corp- (“body”) +‎ -o- +‎ -graphy (“writing”).

Noun

corpography (countable and uncountable, plural corpographies)

1. a means of conceptualizing a battlefield or war through the physical forms of soldiers
   • 2023, Mary Allitt, “Corpography: Reconceptualising Somatic Geographies” (chapter 1), in Medical Caregiving Narratives of the First World War: Geographies of Care, Edinburgh University Press, pages 30-65:

     In discussing the modern experience of battle, Derek Gregory has developed the neologistic concept of ‘corpography,’ explaining that ‘the radically different knowledges that the war-weary soldiers improvised as a matter of sheer survival [constitute] a corpography: a way of apprehending the battle space through the body as an acutely physical field in which the senses of sound, smell and touch were increasingly privileged in the construction of a profoundly haptic or somatic geography.’

   • 2018, Eileen Rositzka, Cinematic Corpographies: Re-Mapping the War Film Through the Body (Cinepoetics, Vol. 3), De Gruyter, →ISBN:

     What he calls ‘corpography’ implies a constant re-mapping of landscape through the soldier’s body.

2. the study of the experience of living in a body
   • 2015, Derek Gregory, “Gabriel’s Map: Cartography and Corpography in Modern War” (chapter 4), in Peter Meusburger, Derek Gregory, Laura Suarsana, editors, Geographies of Knowledge and Power (Knowledge and Space, Vol. 7), →ISBN, pages 89-121:

     Their improvisational knowledges were intensely corporeal and constituted a ‘corpography’ whose constructions relied primarily on sound, smell and touch.

   • 2023, Alicia Rodriguez, Women in Motion: Corpographies of Francophone Narratives:

     Space in the Francophone literature of the 20th century acts as an active player in the narratives here studied. This is where my use of the concept of “corpography” provides a new methodology to study representations of space within novels as it is conceived, perceived, and lived by characters in retracing their movements.