The Flowers of Extinction: An Ecocritical Flâneur in London, April 2019 to April 2020

Abstract

ABSTRACT How does one do ‘ecocritical Walter Benjamin’ in the city of London? As a professional flâneur between April 2019 and April 2020, I enlisted the support of Benjamin’s 1940 writings ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ and ‘On the Concept of History’, and four poems from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. These lyrics explore entangled spaces between the human and nonhuman world. Benjamin developed two concepts – ‘shock’ and ‘shock experience’ (Chockerlebnis), the latter through his engagement with Baudelaire’s work. Therefore, ecopoetic analyses of Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’, ‘Obsession’ (1857), ‘Le Soleil’ and ‘Le Squelette Laboureur’ (1861) aided my analysis of four London sites: Lewisham’s train tracks, Sky Garden, Oxford Circus, and the Charterhouse Museum. Reading the four sites with the aid of Baudelaire’s lyrics allowed an unearthing and creation of dialectical images as they relate to the climate emergency.