hannah's final abstract

Walking on the Road: Understanding de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” through McCarthy’s The Road

In this paper, I attempt to both clarify and enhance de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” by drawing parallels with his theory and Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic landscape the The Road. De Certeau uses the cityscape as a setting for the complexities and singular “practices” of individuals living within the city. The point he aims to make is that it is not the voyeuristic, panoptic, or theoretical perspective of the city, but the paths and daily practices of the people below that gives the place significance. He illustrates this idea through the act of walking; he asserts that it is the walkers that give the landmarks and proper names meaning within the city, despite the greatest efforts of the totalitarian system to subdue these personal experiences of city life. In The Road, McCarthy conveys de Certeau’s theories at an extreme and magnified level by focusing on a man and a boy journeying by foot toward a better life in the south. The path that they forge demonstrates a reappropriation of meaning and significance with every step in their path, despite the barren land. Thus,  those left behind by the apocalypse have the great responsibility of creating a new city (and civilization, for that matter) from the ground-up.