The eye, the street, and the modern painter: The city from Poe to Joyce

This thesis examines the development of the image of the modern metropolis in conjunction with a unique type of literary hero who appears in literature during the eighteenth century: the city spectator. While investigations of the urban observer have surfaced in many divergent contexts and literary periods, most accounts of the subject rely, to varying degrees, on the same core narrative and assumptions implicit to Walter Benjamin's seminal theorizations of the figure of the flaneur. Drawing attention to the distinction between historical and literary spectators of metropolitan spaces, this dissertation proposes an alternative approach to the genesis and development of the figure of the urban observer in Western fiction. Offering a corrective to the discourse of the flaneur, this study argues that the origins of the historical and the literary spectator are dramatically different and evaluates the latter figure as a fluid motif that presupposes a wide range of gradually changing assumptions about subjectivity, visuality, and urban presentation.;The dissertation distinguishes three different types of spectators in city texts: 1) the physiognomist of neo-Classical urban sketches and in early realist fiction; 2) the Romantic visionary seer of lyrical verse and late Gothic fiction 3) and the modernist phenomenological observer of the early twentieth-century metropolitan novel. Each mode of city watching is related to three different models of organizing urban experience: the panorama, phantasmagoria, and montage. Contrasting the leisurely flaneur to literary urban beholders of the first half of the nineteenth century, I argue that the latter were a result of a transposition of Romantic sensibility, subjectivity, and modes of visuality from bucolic and dark Gothic settings onto the big city. Tracing the use of the spectatorial persona from William Wordsworth's The Prelude and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolai Gogol through Charles Baudelaire's Parisian poems and James Joyce's Ulysses, this dissertation explores the active representational function of the figure of the observer who seeks in the act of looking to transcend his estrangement from the urban community in the mind alone.