Flânerie in Text and City: The Heterogeneous Urban Publics of the Georgian Feuilleton

Abstract

The Georgian feuilleton developed in fits and starts in the first 5 years of the first Georgian newspaper, Droeba. The feuilleton is an exemplary genre in the development of Georgian publics, both urban and print. The digressive narrative of the feuilleton meanders between, ties together, and dialogizes the disembodied world of public texts and the embodied world of real public places, drawing together two different, seemingly antithetical senses of “public”. First, the “metatopical” public created by the circulation of Droeba, a disembodied reflexive intertextual world of stranger-contemporaries, fellow readers of the newspaper reading in their private homes, writing about different somewheres from the perspective of a voice from nowhere. Second, the concrete spatialized set of public places and the quoted, overheard, voices of crowds, stranger-consociates, to be found in those public places, the streets and especially gardens, of the city of Tbilisi which is the exemplary locale which can be presupposed as a “here” shared between the writer and his readers. The feuilletonist dialogizes the garden heterotopias of the city, just as he dialogizes the heteroglossia of the city. The feuilletonist-qua-flâneur then arises at the conjuncture of two public worlds, two parallel streams of circulation of literature and life.