Movement and phantasmagoria in three urban representations

Abstract

The article proposes a critical reading of the urban experience based on the short stories The Man of the Crowd, by Edgar Allan Poe; O cooper de Cida, by Conceição Evaristo; and an essay by Virginia Woolf entitled Street Haunting. Reading the three works allowed us to observe that the movement of the central characters through space was the chosen way of expressing the relationship with a certain way of existing. The rhythm with which the characters move and what their eyes look for establish conflicting relationships with the urban organization itself, also giving rise to reflections on the public-private dialectic and the constitution of a self. The phantasmagoria that permeates the spatial description sometimes appears to facilitate the production of this conflict.