Reading Manhattan, Reading American Masculinity

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This article reintroduces the flâneur, traditionally a figure associated with 19th century Paris, as a methodological tool for investigating literary representations of 21st century American masculinity. Contemporary research on the flâneur has either propagated the disintegrative effect of the modern metropolis on his masculine identity or dismissed the flâneur as a postmodern trope bereft of any specific signified. Conversely, this article will argue, with close readings of E.B. White’s Here is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, that the flâneur returns as the definitive figure of the postmodern age. The flâneur, in making visible the discourses of power that shape masculinity, becomes a counter-hegemonic figure, a self-reflexive analytical agent of subjectivity and masculinity.