Abstract
This chapter considers the contemporary artistic legacy of a prominent figure of urban modernity: the flâneur, who has enjoyed an impressive posterity in cultural theory . This chapter makes the claim that the flâneur is also highly relevant for twentieth- and twenty-first-century locative arts and arts of walking. Starting from Poe ’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), one of the most influential American texts about the nineteenth-century metropolis, I examine two artistic projects that revisit Poe ’s text: Matthew Buckingham ’s 2003 installation A Man of the Crowd and the 2004 Situationist collaborative performance conducted in Manhattan by two flâneuses, Christina Ray and Lee Walton . The chapter offers a new reading of Poe ’s “The Man of the Crowd ” and a new perspective on the evolution of the flâneur that spans fiction, art and theoretical discourses on urban modernity.
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Manolescu, M. (2018). Walking with Poe: “The Man of the Crowd” from Text to Street. In: Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98663-0_2
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