Melancholic flaneries: Urban images and utopian imagination in the works of Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Zhu Tianxin, and Tsai Ming-Liang (China, France)

This dissertation is concerned with the intersection of urban space, space as represented and lived, with everyday practice. Informed by theorists such as Michel de Certeau, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Elizabeth Grosz, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Fredric Jameson, and others, I examine films and literary works that reflect the pressure of the flattening effects caused by modernity (and by its latest form as globalization) and analyze how each work sets up its strategy of resistance to counteract the dominant discourse active in its own period. The works I analyze include Charles Baudelaire's modern poems, Virginia Woolf's urban writings, Taiwanese female writer Zhu Tianxin's novellas, and diasporic Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Minng-Liang's urban films. The works are explored through the lens of "walking"---the most ordinary and seemingly insignificant practice of our everyday life---to reveal the anguished struggle of these artists to create some kind of aura in their age when the idea of aura is gradually falling away.