Travel Writing and the City

Abstract

In ‘Walking the City’, Michel de Certeau describes New York as a city that ‘has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour [as] the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess’ (de Certeau 1988: 91). This insistent reinvention means that New York, in common with other modern cities, is not so well suited to travel writers seeking connections between place, history and the present. As de Certeau observes, New York arises out of a grand concept of the City, which takes as its representational form the panorama that used to be seen from the top of the World Trade Centre. So far above the real city, the panorama has little connection with the practice of everyday daily life. De Certeau even suggests that it provides a panoptic illusion as a strategic distraction from everyday life, from the alienation and disconnection experienced on the crowded city streets.