Aesthetically. Linguistically. Culturally.
Edited by Lasse Gammelgaard, Birgitte Rasmussen Hornbek, Henrik Jørgensen and Lis Norup
The book analyzes the phenomenon of 'street' in a historical longitudinal section, from paths and routes in the Icelandic sagas to the semiotic minefield of an Aarhus traffic light in 2016. Along the way, the tumultuous street life in authoritarian Copenhagen, the industrial street noise in Yonville d'Abbaye (Gustave Flaubert ), stalkers and vagrants in London (EA Poe, Virginia Woolf), the rampage of the masses in Chicago (Johannes V. Jensen), idiosyncratic wanderers in Kristiania and Paris (Knut Hamsun, Louis Aragon), street rhythms and public toilets in Vienna (Georg Heym, Elfriede Jelinek), traffic order in the London Underground, life in Istedgade in Copenhagen (Tove Ditlevsen and Dan Turèll) and on place St. Sulpice in Paris (Georges Perec) and New York's labyrinthine grids (Paul Auster).
In the book's 32 articles, the street is thematized as infrastructure, as a system for regulating movement, traffic, transport, as a channel for discipline and order. But also as a space for deregulation, tumult and chaos.
The street is seen at once as a material, physical world and a forest of symbols, just as its history, phenomenology, existential, political and ideological meanings are explored in a nuanced way.
