진경혜 Kyoung-hye Jin
DOI:10.15794/jell.2025.71.2.009 Vol.71(No.2) 389-413, 2025
Abstract
This article examines Erika Meitner’s Copia drawing on Michel de Certeau’s concepts of “walkers,” “spatial practices,” and “bricolage.” As a poet dwelling in American suburban-urban areas, Meitner engages with everyday spaces shaped by consumer culture and its decline. While rendering her experiences in “non-lieux,” like motels, Walmarts, abandoned retail spaces marked by labelscars into her poems, she captures the insatiable greed behind the 2008 economic recession: “abundant and/ impossible to fill.”
Most of the poems in Copia operate as bricolages, incorporating “poached” materials taken from the streets: brand names, store signs, news clips, photographs, interviews, the Bible, and the Yiddish of her grandmothers. These elements coalesce into symbolic and tactical narratives that resist the totalizing and strategic languages of the institutionalized commercialism.
Through her visit to Detroit in 2010, Meitner witnesses the transformation of abandoned places into sites fostering meaning, community, and artistic expression―from art projects like the Heidelberg Project to impromptu jazz performances in broken neighborhoods. Following Certeau, Meitner envisions the city as a “mobile” and metaphorical space shaped by the footsteps and improvisations of its inhabitants. This study asks whether it is possible to capture the full complexity of urban life―including its ephemerality―without fully engaging with the issues of race, gender, and imperialism. While perhaps not comprehensive, Meitner’s work presents a compelling faith in the resilience and creativity latent in the spatial practices of urban quotidian walkers.
Key Words
Erika Meitner, Copia, Michel de Certeau, spatial practices, bricolage, 에리카 마이트너, 『풍요』, 미셸 드 세르토, 공간의 실천, 브리꼴라주