Abstract
In ‘Walking the City’, Michel de Certeau describes New York as a city that ‘has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour [as] the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess’ (de Certeau 1988: 91). This insistent reinvention means that New York, in common with other modern cities, is not so well suited to travel writers seeking connections between place, history and the present. As de Certeau observes, New York arises out of a grand concept of the City, which takes as its representational form the panorama that used to be seen from the top of the World Trade Centre. So far above the real city, the panorama has little connection with the practice of everyday daily life. De Certeau even suggests that it provides a panoptic illusion as a strategic distraction from everyday life, from the alienation and disconnection experienced on the crowded city streets.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter. 2000. London: The Biography. New York: Doubleday.
Auster, Paul. 1986. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber.
Bell, Gertrude. 1985. The Desert and the Sown. London: Virago.
Belloc, Hilaire. 1942. ‘On History in Travel’. Places. London: Cassell.
Bowen, Elizabeth. 2003. A Time in Rome [1959]. London: Vintage.
De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dickens, Charles. 1970. American Notes and Pictures from Italy. London: Dent.
Durrell, Laurence. 1982. ‘Introduction’ to E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide, xv-xx. London: Michael Haag.
Eliot, George. 1885. Impressions of Berlin. In George Eliot’s Life in Her Letters and Journals ed. J.W. Cross. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood.
Forster, E.M. 1982. Alexandria: A History and a Guide [1922]. London: Michael Haag.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1970. Italian Journey: 1786-1788. Translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. London. Penguin.
Haag, Michael. 1982. ‘City of Words’. In Afterword to E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide, 237-243. London: Michael Haag.
Hartley, L.P. 1953. The Go-Between. London: Penguin.
Hazlitt, William. 1983. Notes of a Journey Through Italy and France [1826]. New York: Chelsea House.
Iyer, Pico. 2000. The Global Soul. London: Bloomsbury.
James, Henry. 1958. The Art of Travel [1870-1905] ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel. New York: Doubleday.
Morris, Jan. 1960. Venice. London: Faber and Faber.
———. 1992. Locations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1997. Hong Kong: Epilogue to Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Morton, H.V. 2001. In Search of London [1951]. London: Methuen.
Murry, Middleton. 1923. The Times Literary Supplement. Cited in (Haag 1982: 240).
Naipaul, V.S. 1987. The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking.
Sinclair, Iain. 1997. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta.
Smollett, Tobias. 1981. Travels Through France and Italy [1766]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tindall, Gillian. 1991. Countries of the Mind. London: Hogarth Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Smethurst, P. (2016). Travel Writing and the City. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54911-2_47
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54911-2_47
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54910-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54911-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)