Great expectations: subjectivities moving through the public and private realm

Abstract

This work is in line with the main theme in our seminar ‘The City and the urban subject in English and American Literature’. In the course of it we have studied the first appearance of the urban subject, amazed by the new metropolitan surroundings that he finds himself in. Then comes the Fláneur who observes, sometimes as an outsider, the new bohemian life in the big cities and finally cannot find a place to fit in the crowd, or either enjoying the crowd in their loneliness. In literature, the cities are built up by the narrator; here is where detail shows its power to set full images in our minds. Cities we know as the back of our hands and like to wander to recall the past, cities we meet for the first time and would like to walk all over, and cities we knew when they were great and now we find destroyed. That we have studied concerning the city. However, this present work is almost entirely related to the urban subject and how they manage to live in the ever-growing city.