Literary Studies at KAIST Lab

This study begins from a conceptual claim: that a character’s spatial freedom is not a quantity she possesses but a configuration among three registers that need not coincide. Physical Space records where the play places her in a scene, as distinct from places merely spoken of. Co-occurrence Space records the spatial range that others’ speech activates around her name, treating proximity, in Jakobson’s metonymic sense, as the datum whether the vocabulary asserts, compares, or denies. Speech Space records the range invoked in her own speech. Because activation is counted whatever the vocabulary claims, these measures report where spatial language gathers rather than what it asserts, a deliberate scope that lets the study ask whether the registers diverge at all. Treating them as separate turns confinement from an assumption into something that can be located. Two gaps give the framework its working purpose: one contrasts discursive with physical space, the form a compensation hypothesis predicts, with discourse expanding where the body is confined; the other contrasts others’ talk with her own speech, asking whose discourse departs from her circumstances. Applied to 242 characters across eighteen Shakespeare plays, the framework shows what a single measure would conceal. The composite gap does not reach significance, which is informative in itself, because decomposing it isolates where divergence lives: women’s placement is gendered in tragedy from the first act, while it is the talk of others, not women’s own speech, that departs from where the play puts them, polarized toward domestic and cosmic extremes rather than the civic middle range that gathers around men. Disguise separates the registers in the same way: it widens physical movement, yet for Rosalind, on a small