Walking or Reading the City : Spatiotemporal narrative forms in contemporary urban Chinese fiction
In his influential essay ‘Walking in the City’, Michel de Certeau contrasts the practice of walking in the city, which produces or ‘enounces’ space; “[t]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language,” with the practice of viewing the city from above, which in turn “transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes.” T