Psychogeography and the novel: fictions of place, motion and identity, 1920 to 1965

Abstract

Psychogeography first emerged in France in the 1950s as an avant-garde experimental behaviour concerned with contesting the alienations of modern urbanism with a praxis of embodied responses to the city. As it was practised by the Lettrist International (1952-57) and later the Situationist International (1957-72), psychogeography and the purposeless drift of the dérive engaged the category of space as a means to supersede the separation of art from the politics of everyday life, thereby reflecting a broader tension within the historical avant-garde concerning the relationship between aesthetics, representation and radical social critique. Notwithstanding its anti-literary beginnings, in recent years psychogeography has evolved into a highly ambiguous form of literary endeavour with an ambivalent relationship to its original avant-garde formulation. In this thesis, I am concerned to reassess the contested and contradictory role of the novel during the avant-garde phase of psychogeography with a view to not only complicating generalised treatments of literary psychogeography but also to consider the full extent of the critique of the classical novel and literary production that the praxis of psychogeography performs. Spanning the antecedents of psychogeography in the “false novels” of the Surrealists to the détournement, or turning around, of novelistic sources in key Situationist texts such as Guy Debord’s Mémoires and the novels of Michèle Bernstein, case studies are drawn from French and British authors at the intersection of the historical moment of the SI who sought to repurpose and redirect existing elements of literary culture to critical ends. By focusing on this overlooked period in literary history during which the negation of the novel and of cultural production more broadly played a crucial role, this study seeks to reposition psychogeography as less a specific sub-genre of the novel than as a dynamic field of struggle between various avant-garde and neo-avant-garde ideologies. In this way, my thesis explores precisely how psychogeographical literatures have evolved to represent a unique form of literary praxis that disrupts the conventions of the novel whilst binding experimentation in space to a broad reaching critique of the alienation of everyday life under capitalist modernity.