Liedeke Plate
Dept. of Comparative Arts/Cultural Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
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Published in: The ESF-LiU Conference Cities and Media: Cultural Perspectives on Urban Identities in a Mediatized World Vadstena; Sweden; 25-29 October; 2
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 20:13, p. 135–138
Published: 2007-03-06
ISBN:
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
The past decades saw the rise of the literary walk throughout Europe. Like all walking-tours ’in the footsteps of’; the literary walk is part of the so-called ’theming’ of historical sites; mediating urban experience in terms of the ’experience economy’ (Pine & Gilmore) and standing in uneasy relation to ’city branding’ as the deliberate manipulation of the city’s image for commercial exploitation. Reconstituting a literary experience in space through the ’rewriting’ of literary texts as urban texts; they mediate people’s approaches to the literary past as they speak of (and to) a desire for an embodied experience that is locked in the ’fast time’ of economic globalization; at once resisting it and inextricably part of it.
Focusing on the literary walking tour as a performance of the city that is exemplary of the ways in which literature constitutes an ’imagined city’ that is; in its turn; projected onto the built environment; this paper explores the literary walk as a particular form of cultural mediation that needs to be considered in the context of the transformed cultural; economic and political cityscapes of Europe.
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