‘Reading the territory’: Psychogeography and urban intertextuality

This review article looks at three recent publications that manifest the intertextual nature of psychogeography, focusing on how the influence of place cuts across disciplinary boundaries to critical effect. In London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), Iain Sinclair continues to harness the oppositional power of conceiving of the city as inherently intertextual. A new volume edited by Tina Richardson, Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015), is largely concerned with psychogeography as method yet its contributions reveal the extent to which the literary character of psychogeography resists supersession. And notwithstanding his disdain for the term, Patrick Keiller’s The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (2013) is nonetheless suggestive of the mutual imbrication of quotation, literary association and the critique of urban space. Revealing contradictory attitudes towards the literary dimensions of psychogeography, these publications raise timely questions about the capacity of psychogeographical texts and methods to effect social change.