There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker. From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?
Matthew Beaumont is a Professor in the Department of English at University College, London. He is the the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009), and co-editor of Restless Cities. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Nightwalking.
Title: The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City: On Losing and Finding Yourself in the Modern City
Author: Matthew Beaumont
ISBN: 9781788738910
Binding:
Publisher: Verso Books
Publication Date: 2020-10-28
Number of Pages: 336
Weight: 0.5001 kg
Matthew Beaumont's prose is the golden thread of elegance and erudition we need to guide us through the labyrinth of the modern city. These essays confirm him to be simultaneously the possessor of a coherent and convincing overview of emergent Modernist thought and creativity in the urban context, and the inheritor of all the radical subjectivities he engages with. This is a superb and always engrossing collection. - Will Self, author of Psychogeography [The Walker] is an erudite book that moves at a pace alternating between brisk and leisurely. ... Like his prose, Beaumont's mind is anything but pedestrian. He is as attuned to matters of medicine and science, anthropology, economics, philosophy and psychology as he is to literature and the visual arts. ... Beaumont uses the language of contemporary literary theory, but with none of the rebarbative jargon-mongering of others in the professoriate. His references to the usual suspects-from Marx, Freud and Adorno through Lacan and Derrida, to Deleuze and Guattari, Zizek and Agamben-are never gratuitous, but always helpful in understanding the literary, historical, and psychological terrain he explores. - Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal [The Walker] is absolutely fascinating and [Beaumont's] literary references are wonderful...I absolutely loved it - Jo Good, BBC Radio London The Walker seeks to take its reader on an intriguing journey ... if you're looking for some escapism that goes beyond the cliches of repetitive travel literature, this could well be the book for you. - Northern Soul [Beaumont's] style is a treat - elegant, intelligent and entertaining as he describes the ways we read a city with our feet and mind, and guides us through a history of walking writing from Dickens and Poe to Marx and Zizek. - Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times An uncanny and haunting foreshadowing of our cities as they now appear to us ... familiar subjects are given revelatory new interpretations ... thought-provoking - Margaret Drabble, Times Literary Supplement Drawing on numerous literary sources, both familiar and obscure, Beaumont takes the reader on a labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking - Sean O'Hagan, Observer [A] heady blend of history and theory. - New Yorker
