Walking the Streets of London in the eighteenth century

a performative art?

Emmanuelle Peraldo

pp. 3-14

in: Klaus Benesch, François Specq (eds), Walking and the aesthetics of modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

Walking can be understood as a form of performative mapping. Contrary to mimesis and the particular vision of space it entails, methexis designates an experimentation of/in space that pre supposes the presence of the body of the observer. Methexis is a performative principle based on the creation of narrative maps of the progress of bodies through their particular observations of space. By juxtaposing De Certeau's theory of the "flâneur" and Debord's idea of psychogeographical drift I shed new light on the aesthetics of walking during the eighteenth century, in particular, regarding texts such as Gay's Trivia (1716), Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), and Journal of the Plague Year (1722).