Urban Walking: Configuring the Modern City as Cultural and Spatial Practice

This dissertation explores the aesthetics of spatial politics and the politics of spatial aesthetics in urban literature and culture from the early twentieth century to the post-industrial era. It develops a theoretical framework on urban walking by intersecting, among other theories, Walter Benjamin's concept of flânerie as a form of perambulating social criticism; Guy Debord's idea of the drive as the drifting journey without an official map; Michel de Certeau's city walking as a rhetorical tactic for creative resistance; as well as the theories of walking by New Urbanists and theories of digital flnerie performing urban walking through virtual windows. The dissertation considers urban walking as both a theoretical method and cultural practice to contend that the experience of the city on foot not only replicates but profoundly shapes social relations and identities, helping with the progressive transformation of space and society. This argument is explored with the help of diverse corpus including urban literature, paintings, and artistic self-performances. The dissertation includes the following thematic foci and works: embodiment in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and James Joyce's Ulysses; gender in the body sculptures and poetry by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and oil paintings by Florine Stettheimer; temporal shifts in Djuna Barne's Nightwood and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City; and ethnic and cultural alterity in the post-9/11 fiction of Joseph ONeill and Teju Cole. The dissertation is framed by the authors' personal and photographic evocations of walking as a practice of acculturation to Toronto over more than a decade. Ultimately, by pivoting between theory and practice, text and visual, the study advances the field of urban walking as a dynamic and underexplored scholarly space for politically engaged interventions responding to the economic, gender, racial, and ecological urgencies of our era.