Download or read book Perversions of the Street written by Michael Edward LeBlanc and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines a wide range of cultural and literary texts centered on modern and postmodern street life, from the urban gothic fiction of Edgar Allan Poe to the contemporary rap music of 50 Cent. Through my analysis, I discover that the psychic reality involved in fantasy has the power to literally shape "concrete" urban reality in a wide variety of ways: at the point of urban planning when cultural values are applied to a larger design (the 1811 grid plan of New York), at the point of public policy creation when officials make value judgments concerning urban space (the war on drugs), or at the point of everyday life when fantasy shapes how pedestrians experience the street. Examining the pedestrian fantasies surrounding flâneurs , prostitutes, and gangsters, I explore how the mean streets are fashioned by desire.