Urban Walking: The Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Film ed. by Oliver Bock, Isabel Vila-Cabanes

Abstract

 Reviews resolve for us. Living Philosophy is not prescriptive, either. Rather, through its repetitions, anecdotes, and lengthy quotations, readers are invited to forge their own suggestive connections, to experience Kierkegaard, Melville, and company individually. Mooney offers an appealing philosophy of hope and wonder, which, he hopes, will stimulate forms of compassionate responsibility. U  B J P Urban Walking: e Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Film. Ed. by O B and I V-C. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press. . £. ISBN ––––. A dozen chapters and a light Introduction make for an amiable, enlightening, and sometimes challenging stroll through metropolitan culture in a variety of case studies of flânerie. e Introduction by the editors sets a traditional scene: it is ‘the onset of modernity’ and, unable to arrest the rise of urbanization, we are enthralled by ‘the mediative observer of urban life’ (p. ix)—the flâneur. At first a literary model, enthroned in nineteenth-century Paris by Baudelaire and Benjamin, the flâneur and the flâneuse wander and thrive, becoming figures of and in urban culture as much as they are beyond it and looking on. is volume attempts to observe the observer, spying on flâneurs and flâneuses from the perspective of a conference on the subject that took place in the University of Jena in  (meaning one imagines with envy the post-conference strolls around Jena in the central metropolitan area of uringia). Indeed, that Jena grew in a spurt of industries dedicated to optical care suggests an ideal location for the papers that fed into this volume on seeing the growth of the modern city. Contributions are sorted into five categories, roughly corresponding to theories, emblematic portrayals, postmodernism, global (i.e. postcolonial) flânerie, and, finally, intermediality , which tags onto an essentially literary anthology two chapters concerned with extremely different films (one an avant-garde experimentalist venture and the other a mainstream, star-driven Hollywood product). Carrying the most weight in the volume is Eva Katharina Ries, whose chapter attempts to reconfigure flânerie as an ethical subject, which involves looking away from the fixity of Walter Benjamin towards the fluidity of Judith Butler’s effort at understanding / and the sense, sensation, and sensibility of precariety that resulted. Vividly written, with keen readings of Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Siri Hustvedt’s e Blindfold to mark the way, the chapter is a triumph of re-energizing the relevance of flânerie. Holding that flânerie ‘becomes a gateway for acknowledging the precariousness of oneself and Others’ (p. ), Ries argues that it is an ambivalent practice redeemed almost by empathy, were it not for the fact that empathy ‘is always already prone to serving one’s own performance of sovereignty’ (p. ). Calling for ‘ever new performances of non-sovereign subjectivity’ (p. ), this first chapter sets a challenge for a volume that manages a scattershot response. Lea Herrmann’s chapter rather reaffirms the established critical framework of flânerie in semi-autobiographical texts by Peter Kurzeck, while the series of chapters MLR, .,   on emblematic portrayals offers interesting descriptions of flânerie in Scandinavia and London but also entrenches the motifs in studies of bohemians, detectives, and Virginia Woolf. Postmodern literature promises more: Ina Schabert considers blogging as flânerie, albeit still grounded in Paris, while Daniel Chukwuemeka finds a new purpose for it in considering Afropolitanism within the confines of New York, where it recovers cultural memory. ereaer, examples of the global flâneur at large in Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, and Delhi are as entertaining as they are informative, but also tentative in a way that borrows rather than claims flânerie for locations other than modern Western urban centres. Flânerie is a concept and a creative practice that this volume does well to recognize and explore. Strongest when it is using flânerie to explore new ideas of identity rather than merely as the urban backdrop to such introspection, this book is distinguished by those contributors who posit the Self as far more interesting than the city, finding distance more revealing than togetherness, seeing flânerie as a strategy of (self-)representation. As a kaleidoscope of city life via intermediality it is somewhat lacking in colours, inhibiting transcendence from...