Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19528 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Synopsis
Psychogeography. Increasingly this term is used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas from key lines and the occult, to urban walking and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? This book examines the origins of Psychogeography in the Situationist Movement of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and its political applications as well as the work of early practitioners such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Elsewhere, psychogeographic ideas continue to find retrospective validation in much earlier traditions from the visionary writing of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey to the rise of the flaneur on the streets of 19th century Paris and on through the avant-garde experimentation of the Surrealists. These precursors to Psychogeography are discussed here alongside their modern counterparts, for today these ideas hold greater currency than ever through the popularity of writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Keiller.

From Urban Wandering to Cognitive Mapping, from the Derive to Detournement, "Psychogeography" provides us with new ways of apprehending our surroundings, transforming the familiar streets of our everyday experience into something new and unexpected. This guide conducts the reader through this process, offering both an explanation and definition of the terms involved, an analysis of the key figures and their work as well as practical information on Psychogeographical groups and organisations.

Customer Reviews

Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley
A great introduction to psychogeography from Defoe and De Quincey via Debord and the Situationists and on to the present day. Lively, fluent and well researched, this book takes you on a fascinating journey through London, Paris and the literature that these cities have inspired. Highly Recommended.

Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley
Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley is a Pocket Essentials Guide book that offers an introduction to Psychogeography in an easily-digested form. Coverley's drift covers what he calls the literary tradition of psychogeogaphy and concentrates on the London-Paris axis. He traces an outline back to the surrealists' exploration of the magical city, back through John Michell, Walter Benjamin and Alfred Watkins to William Blake and forwards to J G Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Stewart Home & the London Psychogeographic Association (LPA).

I find the book valuable in both its narrow view and in what it leaves out. One thing that has been very distinctive about psychogeography is that it trangresses artificial borders and externally imposed taxonomies. Blake is known as both a radical literary figure and as the guy who did the words to "Jerusalem" that they sing at the Tory party conference. His self-published work blurred the boundaries between "literature" and "visual art" in much the same way as today's "graphic novels" do.

In the other examples Coverley refers to, the psychogeographer's work often uses text, but in a way that text dematerialises, where fiction blurs with fact, rumour and hearsay. Iain Sinclair's books are often heavily illustrated and he also regularly collaborates with photographers and film-makers. According to Jeff Nuttall's book, Bomb Culture the novellist JG Ballard, whose work is firmly rooted in surrealism as it is in the suburban landscape was also a pioneer of Installation Art. The output of the LPA has included experiments with hypertext on the www. The LPA's publications often make no sense at all without the collision of text, photographs and diagrams. In short Psychogeography occurs as a literary stream, within hypertext. By hypertext I mean not only text that is linked to other text via mark-up language, but also text that refers to and is made up of existing texts, twisting the memetic structure of the infosphere.

While finding a centre has been a concern of many psychogeographers, it has long been clear that the centre (or Omphalos) is a shifting and a rambling thing, so it could be London, it could be Paris, but the chances are that is really elsewhere.

Within the text Coverley plays with the psychogeographers' tricks of bilocation. Stewart Home's novel 69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess, a novel apparently set in Scotland, becomes a "London Novel". So London is explored using a Hobbit's map of the Scottish stone circles.

The pocket guide probably belongs as a small chapter in a bigger book about psychogeography, but until that one is written, it is a welcome introduction to the subject.