Cultural Studies --  Postmodernism -- Literary Criticism -- IACD

The Flaneur
Rob Shields.  "Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin's note on flanerie"

Using Benjamin's Konvolut on the flaneur, I would like to consider the inter-relationship between

1. the flaneur or the strolling subject;
2. writing as representation
3. the late-19th-century centres of empire like Paris, and
4. 'Mohicans' -- those non-European Others who appear to be the fascinating objects of the flaneur's writerly gaze.

I. Flaneurie: Definitions

• Definition: flanerie as an urban myth; (or p. 67 "the flaneur is a mythological ideal-type found more in discourse than in everyday life.")
• strolling at an overtly leisurely pace + intense observation,
• "crowd practice, a connoisseur's 'art of doing' crowd behaviour.  As an ethic it retrieves the individual from the mass by elevating idiosyncrasies and mannerisms as well as individuality and singular perspective of an individual's observations and point of view.
• the specific social and historical and spatial positions of flaneur 62-63
• wealthy, individual, male,
• a figure of excess--drunkenness

II. Flaneur (as a displaced native; 'Mohican de Paris') and Savage:

• Flaneur:
• a utopian representation of a carefree (male) individual in the midst of the urban maelstrom in what were popular, serialized novels intended for a mass audience. p. 67.
• a hero who excels under the stress of coming to terms with a changing 'social spatialization.'
• Stranger: p. 68
• Flaneur as Mohicans: p. 69
• impassive, but observant,
• savages; excessive and anomic individualism p. 71

III. Flaneur's Time and Space:

different from Blase

psychotic appropriation of time and space.  73

appropriation of defamiliarlized and exotic spectacles; to master the local, physical spaces; to master and even revel in the 'emporium.'

From appropriation to consumption

IV. Emporium and alienation

• flaneurie as time-space psychosis  p. 77

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