| Kommentar |
Walter Benjamin’s iconic flâneur, strolling leisurely through the streets and beautifully ornamented arcades of 19th century Paris, has often been dismissed as a spoilt idler with little interest in political subversion. A look at the long history of literary engagements with this particular form of urban walking, and at the diverse background of writers who engage with it, however, show that flânerie has long overcome the constraints of 19th-century high capitalist Paris and reveals this activity's potentially subversive politics. After all, flânerie raises the question of who belongs to a city, and who has a right to walk in and enjoy it. Early South African depictions of urban walking, for instance, have employed flânerie to express black protagonists’ right to the city.
In this Proseminar, we will acquaint ourselves with seminal theoretical concepts related to urban walking, in particular Walter Benjamin’s work on the flâneur, Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City”, and more recent approaches by Sarah Nuttal and Achille Mbembe. We will read our way through a range of literary texts engaging with (leisurely) urban walking, including examples of the satirical column “R. Roamer Esq.” by the South African writer R.R.R. Dhlomo, published in the 1930s , Gwendolyn Brookes’s poem “In the Mecca” , excerpts from the novel The Uncertainty of Hope by the Zimbabwean writer Valerie Tagwira (who, like Brookes, presents a feminist perspective on urban walking), Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (excerpts), Tendai Huchu's The Maestro, The Magistrate & the Mathematician, and Teju Cole’s Open City.
Students are advised to buy the following editions:
• Teju Cole. Open City. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.
• Tendai Huchu. The Maestro, The Magistrate & the Mathematician. Bulawayo: Amabooks, 2014.
Further reading material (including Brookes’s poem and excerpts from Tagwira’s and Hawthorne’s novels) will be provided.
|
