more Teju Cole

We'll start off with more discussion. Monday's class focused nearly entirely on issues of fictional form breakage and play. Let's spend some time discussing any issues related to content that interest you, so please come with some topics or questions you'd like to discuss. We can also discuss uses of photography in fiction and poetry books. I'll bring in some examples.

In the second half of class, we'll be leaving the classroom to go on a dérive, so come prepared for the weather and bring any sort of writing situation that will work for you on the move--anything from a small notebook to dictating notes on your phone. I'll be asking you to fill out this sheet   Download this sheet  when you're done and upload it or photos of it, along with any photos, sketches, or maps you made during your dérive. I'll also have hard copies of the sheet in class.

Perhaps you will want to turn your dérive into an artistic response to Teju Cole's book? If so, think about how you might turn your experience into fiction or into a poem or into a performance. Would you also include images of some kind? As you work on it, think about what makes a dérive different from a flânerie.

Optional

Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive Download Theory of the Dérive

Notes on Flânerie 

Baudelaire (in The Painter of Modern Life):

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus, the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.

Susan Sontag (in On Photography):

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque."

Victor Fournel:

This man [the flâneur] is a roving and impassioned daguerreotype that preserves the least traces, and on which are reproduced, with their changing reflections, the course of things, the movement of the city, the multiple physiognomy of the public spirit, the confessions, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd.

If you'd like to play around with more derives on your own, you can download the Dérive app Links to an external site. to your phone.